I understand the commanders they are selling were those specifically made for backers of a certain level that they figured they could make some cash off of if other people were interested ( a brilliant idea imo) but are they going to stop there ? Or open up kind of a Community workshop like TF2 or planetside where players can create and submit commanders to sell?
Seems unlikely to me. That would mean anyone could have a custom model (either by sending/getting it automatically, or sending/buying it afterwards) for 0-15 $ instead of the 1K+ $ required by the KS Tier (IIRC) I read somewhere they didn't thought about selling the custom KS commanders initially.
They are going to sell more commanders of the kickstart backers - until they have all those custom commanders whose effective owners agreed in the store. As soon as those are made and put into the gamefiles. I think currently it was around 20 commanders in the gamefiles, including event ones (wich will not come on sale).
I think that KS backers that backed 1000$ or more, something like that, get to make their own custom commander, no one else.
The plan is to have a 'mod marketplace' where user created content can be made available from within the game and there will be a mechanism for selling mods where appropriate. This means that modders could in theory create their own commander model and sell it- the 1k+ backers paid for UBER to create them a custom commander- that doesn't preclude people making their own. Out of interest @KNight (a talented modeller) has created his own commander, although it will require Uber to finish it as currently there are some limitations on what modders can get into the game directly (although both the RCBM and Statera mods have produced a few new units so it is already possible).
At this point it's unknown. At the end of the day we need to keep in mind that so far only 6 Custom Commanders have been released and there is still potentially ~95 more to come yet so it could be quite some time before those are "processed" depending how Uber plans to do it. Aside from that, I don't think we'll see something on the same "Relative" scale as what Valve have undertaken, I don't even really think it will be "needed" because of the Modding aspect of PA once that gets into full swing essentially allows anyone to play with thier own commander. That being said there are some obvious ways to leverage the idea of New "Custom Commanders", Simplest being in terms of a design contest, Players can submit concepts, maybe based on specific tag-line or theme, to Uber, they can pick the one(s) that best fit and make those into commanders. There is also the potential to do them as Tournament Prizes like Uber already dabbled with during the Battle of the Beasts Tournament(Beast Commander) and there are of course many more options available in addition to these but you can't just dive in and overdo it, The Armory is already going to have such a large selection of commanders from the potential Custom Commanders that overwhelming customers and the Armory system is a distinct possibility as well. I don't expect to see much in this regard for some time, there are already so many Custom Commanders left to do and other big aspects of the game will likely require some artist-based attention as well in the coming months but beyond that it does certainly have the potential to help keep the community involved and active. I'm actually a 1K Backer, so my Tyrant is one of the Custom Commanders that will eventually go through that whole process, the difference being that instead of submitting concepts and/or inspirations I was able to make a "proper" model, whether or not Uber makes changes or what not is still unknown as it hasn't come up yet in the list among all the other 1K, 5K and 10K Custom Commanders. Mike
