Hey I just saw that Valve is going allow community created mods for Skyrim like they do for TF2. I don't play Skyrim or TF2 but it is example of a game company with a dedicated community which getting benefit out of letting users make new content.
http://store.steampowered.com/news/6906/
I know that COH is an MMO and so it is different, but you have all these people here with talent (not me tho) and lots of creativity. I wish they could open things up a little and let people make costume parts and emotes and especially maps and submit them with a community based rating system so the devs can pick from the cream of the crop to publish to the real servers.
If they could follow the same path - i.e. there is no support, people figure out how to do it from some basic instructions with most everybody learning how from forums and wikis and whatnot. The only thing that might be tricky is how to test it, or maybe their formats are so different there is no way to get from a standard model file into the COH program.
But anyway we have a game here that has survived I think mostly because of the freedom the costume editor and other choices that allow us to express ourselves, because the gameplay is nothing special. Add to that we have a huge community of dedicated and mostly friendly players and I'll bet alot of them know their way around a modelling program.
So this isn't for everybody like AE is, but more for those that are devs in RL themselves but still I think it would be great for everybody and would be much cheaper to set up and run than AE. What I mean is that AE took a lot of new code to write, where this is just some instructions to write and maybe some way to try out a map or model on just your own computer. Don't need to write any new code for the servers or change how data is stored.
For their business it makes perfect sense. If you look around, most everybody in COH has like 100 veteran badges so they are already earning their money from the people who are heavily invested. Keeping them interested by creating something like a modding community would ensure continued interest while at the same generating more fun new stuff than full-time paid staff can produce.
There must be some appealing business slang for it.
"leveraging your synergistic assets" or something. Or maybe "getting your customers to make free stuff for us".
Just a bit off on a tangent, I had a post once upon a time suggesting players submit their AE story in a contest where the prizes would be having the actual arc entered as a radio or paper mish or maybe even a tip mish. It would be pretty cool and would probably get AE going again and the prizes (being a part of CoX canon) would be way cooler than other AE contests they've had.