Edit:
Let me just address the first thing. Yes everything officially added will need to be verified by GW. How is this any different then the process done with all other cosmetics? Its the same thing but FS doesnt need to spend the time and money on making the cosmetics.
- GW refuses a community made cosmetic? FS loses nothing.
- GW rejects a FS made cosmetic? FS loses the time and effort put into that cosmetic.
Less risk, same reward, no effort required.
As long as people do not sell/profit off of these cosmetics individually there is no threat to GWs business. Yes GW does take down fan art, no that is not the same thing. Profiting off of fanart/doing commissions is violating GW’s intellectual property, that is why you cant make proxy models or charge people for 40k fan art, or really profit/post too much fan material in general. That is violating their intellectual property. No this suggestion is not the same thing.
Explination of why this is different:
- I make a 40k model (perfectly legal you can make literally anything of anything as long as you do not share/profit off of it)
- I go to fatshark and say “here this is yours now” (It is now the legal property of fatshark)
- Fatshark has the license to warhammer
- Fatshark shows the model that they now own to GW and say “can we put this in our game”
- The model is legally the same as a model made by any other contractor.
Also yes people are easily able to make things at the quality level of Darktide:
Example from the current CS2 workshop arguably higher quality then the weapon textures we have in darktide:
Other Examples: Spend 5 seconds on etsy with search term “40k” or “Darktide”
Rest of my arguments if you really need them:
Let me just start by saying Valve makes $20m a year for copy pasting workshop cosmetics into TF2 alone. Now of course TF2 is a more popular game with a arguably predatory loot box system, but the point still stands. (Yes TF2 is a simple art style but look at the texture work people do on CS2 weapons and also the absolutely insane amount of extremely high quality proxy models for 40k tabletop)
The Warhammer community is extremely creative oriented and a large portion have 3d modeling experience/like doing art in general. Warhammer has also practically infinite opportunities for cosmetics.
I guarantee you hundreds if not thousands of people will put free work into submitting items like this, for the prospect of 1: Getting their work into a official Warhammer product. 2: Getting a small portion of sales (I believe valve gives 15%).
Literally all that needs to be done is activate the workshop and then get some intern to copy paste the highest rated submissions every few months into a “Community Shop” section of Commodore’s Vestures. Also yes show the submissions to a GW rep before fully adding it in, but this has to be done with all cosmetics how is it any different here?
Would be nice if you could also equip workshop cosmetics (not added in officially yet) in the psykhanium/(potentially solo mode) but that’s honestly not needed.
- Practically 0 work
- People will like getting more cosmetics
- People will like having a none rotating shop
Worst case not enough people submit cosmetics/good cosmetics, in that case you loose like a week worth of dev time (if that). Best case you make millions for doing basically nothing.
Yeah this would require releasing some textures and models for people to work off of. But people can already pretty easily rip those from the game so that is hardly a downside.
Its like outsourcing but free and you don’t need to give concept art or anything!
Also idk if valve has any rules for doing this or not. But worst case it could easily be a in game thing or done on a special webpage or something.
