Evil Geniuses

A performance-critical front end for a global esports audience

Evil Geniuses is one of the longest-running organisations in competitive esports, with an audience that arrives in spikes — match days, roster announcements, tournament finals. The platform had to hold up when traffic multiplied without warning, on devices ranging from flagship phones to whatever is available in an internet café.

The problem

Audience-facing content was updating constantly — scores, rosters, schedules, editorial — while the site itself was built to serve largely static pages. Every update meant a full round trip, and the experience degraded exactly when attention was highest. The brief was a front end that could reflect live state without a reload, and a back end that stayed predictable under burst load.

What we built

• Angular front end. Component-driven architecture with client-side state, so live data — standings, fixtures, roster changes — updates in place rather than forcing a page load. Lazy-loaded routes kept the initial bundle small for mobile.
• CodeIgniter service layer. A deliberately lean PHP back end exposing a clean API surface. Chosen for predictable performance characteristics and a small footprint rather than framework fashion.
• Responsive delivery. Layouts verified across the device range the audience actually uses, not just the ones convenient to test.
• Content-update workflow. Editorial and competitive staff could publish without engineering involvement — the constraint that mattered most on match days.

Why this stack

Angular’s structure and dependency injection suit an application with many interdependent, frequently-updating components; the discipline it imposes pays off as a codebase outlives its original authors. Pairing it with a minimal PHP service layer kept the operational surface small — fewer moving parts to fail under load, and a hosting profile that stayed economical at scale.

Outcome

A responsive, live-updating platform that holds its performance during traffic spikes, with a content workflow that does not require a developer in the loop.