@kreestuh is doing some stuff and may be AFK for a bit. Here's the skinny: I don't want to speak for her, she's the most succint speaker here on this topic. Spec work is the devil. We work in the industry and the development industry has a lot of the same ptifalls and problems as the creative industry.
Generally speaking, we think it is wrong to make a request of the audience such as: "Do some cool stuff we intend to make money off of, and we'll give you some sort of token pay if we decide it is cool."
We're just as excited as y'all are, just to do it for the fun of doing it, and want to sort of run around like crazy people spraying all the stuff everywhere.
So I think it would be our preference to steer a thread like this toward making art that the community can enjoy -- things like level1 wallpapers and fun stuff like that. And if out of that there is something we can turn into shirts our mousepads, then that is great.
@kreestuh is also working on some artwork around those, and some really funny (at least it seems so, have to sort of see if it wears out fast) "Milk Raptor" stuff. It'll be a while before we ramp up the products. All the up-front investment for this kind of stuff comes from our own pockets, sort of on risk, which is fine and we set it up so this stuff can't negatively affect the core mission of content production (though it can positively affect it in that revenues from this can help us defray production costs and various expenses from people to equipment and props).
TLDR: So while we want to encourage the audience to let their creative juices flow, we are very sensitive to "exploiting" our position with the audience. So to any artists we would say do it first to share your art with the community and not because it is something we're asking for, or some type of contest or whatever it might be construed as.
Of course something might become part of our collective memory (haha milk raptor anyone!?) totally organically, and then we'd want to do products of course. It's just too funny not to! The audience's enthusiasm is infectious with us, for sure.
We had discussed with the moderators and @Zoltan suggested when we did a creative thread that we let everyone know that they should only upload their work under a Creative Commons type license. Perhaps he can weigh in real quick here.
More on Spec Work and why it should never, ever be tolerated by workers in the industry: http://www.nospec.com/ "Hey do some funny shirts for us and if we use it, we'll pay you" is just not something, ethically, any of us can stomach. And if you work in the industry, it shouldn't be tolerated either. Read the nospec site and understand why if this seems weird, because it does come up often. :-\
p.s. we love you all, you creative hobos!