Guild Wars 2

tl;dr – Account wide costumes would sell well, and independent artists could produce way more of them for less coss to ANet than hiring a bunch of artists.
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When I look at the gem store, I find nothing I want. I bought a couple extra character slots, and am pretty much done. At the same time, I’d be okay with paying ANet more money to support a game I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of.

With that in mind, I gave serious thought to what I would buy. Turns out it’s the same stuff I bought lots of in the last MMO I spent this much time with, Champions Online. There I bought tons of costumes. Often times, I’d buy costumes for a single character concept I had, or I’d buy a full set for a single piece that I knew I’d use with multiple characters. And in talking to other players, I know I wasn’t alone. Cosmetics are a huge deal to making your character your own versus just another generic looking thing like all the other avatars.

However, making costumes is time consuming. Even though the devs acknowledged that cosmetics were huge sellers and actively pushed creating more and more, it was barely a trickle of new stuff every month. I suspect ANet would have the same problem. The solution is easy. Just do what Valve does and let independents have the tools they need to make the content for you and give them a cut of the sales.

There are good open source tools for creating characters. Things like Blender and MakeHuman pretty much open the door wide for anyone that wants to get into it. If ANet would create a tool or the design specs needed for independent artists to create costumes, I suspect they’d have a whole lot of takers as it is just that easy to get into.

ANet could then take these costumes, and after screening, put them up for sale on the gem store for say 400 gems ($5) or so. Split the money with the artists $3 for creator $2 for ANet, and they’d have a nice new source of income that would cost ANet only a couple of people to screen submissions (cuz ya, you’d want that) versus hiring the hundreds of artists that’d be necessary to come close to the output of opening up costume design to the community.

As for the costumes, they’d need to be account wide and multiple use. Just sell a transmute token that doesn’t get consumed on use. This creates a real value to players. Like me, they could buy a costume for a character concept they have, or they could buy a costume just for one piece that they want to use on multiple characters.

This suggestion gives ANet an opportunity for a nice revenue stream at minimal cost and effort while at the same time providing items that players would see real entertainment value in and give artists an outlet to make some extra cash. Pretty much win-win-win.

I would love to see user-generated content. If ANet ran it as a recurring contest to pick a new armor set, it would add a bit of variety to the game. I’d love to see something similar for weapons and town clothes.

I think ANet has plenty of fans who would generate content for free (look at some of the incredible work on the fan art boards on GW2Guru, for example), and that’s what EA’s been doing with The SIMS for years.

‘For free’ runs into a host of problems, not the least of which is that quality of submissions drops precipitously over time, especially if ANet is going to turn around and sell the submissions for money.

Contrast that with companies that pay a small royalty for content who maintain a significantly high quality of content over the life of the product. And even paying that royalty, ANet generates a huge new revenue stream at the cost of only one or two new hires who screen the submissions to make sure they’re of decent quality and not obscene.