;tldr - With 3D printing becoming increasingly available and less expensive, a method to capture an action scene and render it as a STY or other model file would give players a new creative outlet and give the studio a potential revenue stream.
The reason to think about this now rather than later is that it is rather like the demorecord capability in City of Heroes. That functionality was not originally intended as something for players to use in making custom "movies". It was originally some developer's solution for doing demos to press and investors and what not.
The reason it existed at all is that it was implemented early in the design cycle of the client. If someone had come along two years into CoH and said, "Let's do this!" they would have been shot down cold.
The one thing that history teaches us about game clients is that once they are in working order, you don't screw with them much more than you have to, in order to keep them in working order.
Arcanaville's work with trying to dump models at the end of CoH's life shows that a lot of the potential is already there in the 3D modeling of the rendering engine. What was lacking was the "inside knowledge" that the client had (or potentially could have) about the "whole picture". In an ideal world, the client itself would render the scene and then export it with a precise layout based on knowing exactly the camera angles and the architecture.
If this seems like a desirable feature then it's something that, like demorecord, needs to go into the client early rather than later. The hooks need to exist from the beginning so that they aren't being kludged in later or, worse, never implemented at all because it would be too much work or too many changes to the client.
