Esports are ultimately an entertainment product. Showing player portraits/cams help people connect better to the players which allows them to get more invested in esports. I'm sure they've made the cam/portrait as small as possible while still allowing people to clearly recognize players.
no its fine to show players but if u watch the vod u can see the player and then so much unnecessary blank white space in the background, like just cut out the white space and show the portrait no?
Same, not a big fan of this layout with the huge static picture box on screen, it would be make sense if they did it like the BLAST UI layout with players static picture on Counter Strike.