Is there anywhere or planned to be anywhere where people can upload their own repaints & download others? There seems to be some good repaints out these but it would be a shame if they can't be shared outside of screenshots.
Matt and Sam have said on numerous occasions, that livery sharing will not be an option, due to licensing issues. If you want to share reskins, try this site. (works for PC only) https://www.trainsimcommunity.com/
I assume that it's something that most people don't hear about because it's only talked about here in the forums. I'm sure if it was an official announcement, it certainly would be talked about more. Anyways, here's what DTG Protagonist said on one occasion:
I totally get this and remember them saying it. It always made me wonder how Forza gets away with it with their livery editor though. You get replica F1 liveries, racing cars with the Adidas logo etc etc which you would imagine would be heavily copyrighted logos and they are all free to share.
Forza is owned by a much bigger company, Microsoft (Xbox Games Studios), which has a way larger legal team to deal with possible issues, unlike DTG, which is mostly unknown. Also, Xbox Games Studios is a US company, so I’m not sure if there are any law differences which allow for such things to be done.
Giants software does ok with Farming sim when it comes to mods and mod licensing for both PC and console. They’re also not a US company nor a large one such as Microsoft. I wouldn’t think it’d be out of the realm of possibility to have some kind of mod or mod approval system for this game on PC and console if they really wanted it. Maybe the railroad industry is more anal about licensing than the farming industry, I really don’t know. If DTG already has a license to create routes and stock for a certain RRs you’d think allowing us to create another skin for such railroad (pending approval) wouldn’t be too much to ask for.
Quite possibly, yes. Some railroads (BNSF for example) don't want people to attempt and recreate their logos, which currently is the only thing you can do if you want a realistic BNSF livery. Speaking of that railroad as well, they also don't approve use of their logos in digital content outside of the USA (and maybe Canada). To be honest, no company wants you to try and recreate their logo, they'd much rather appreciate it if you copy-pasted it as an image from their branding guidelines web page. But sadly, in TSW2, that's not possible. I'd imagine that this, among a couple other factors which haven't been considered by the community yet, are the reason that we can't share liveries.