soo, pretty much the textbook definition of a gimmick?
to me the million different clothing combinations are a useless feature (well i will probably choose the ugliest possible combination in the beginning but that’ll likely be the last time i touch it) that at worst can be used to make yourself less visible, think all black clothes in a dark map. but i’m not most people people and it could be it keeps some people entertained for few months and may even generate some sales since it hasn’t been done in a commercially released fps game before. ( warsow has a primitive version of it, but luckily the developers were smart enough to include a way to force the model/skin/color of the enemy. ) so it is possible all the man hours spent on that stuff are worth it financially, I’m not saying gimmicks are necessarily a bad thing.
You seem to be looking at it is as “It doesn’t affect gameplay, so it’s useless.” If that’s the case, it could just be an incredibly well balanced game of stick figures shooting at blocks. Brink is a game. Games are meant to be fun, and customization is fun and many players will agree with me. Not only is customization itself fun, but when players have a character that they created and customized to look how they want, the actual game becomes more fun, because they are playing with a character they made and have a greater connection towards them. It like the game “City of Heroes.” I used to have a subscription to that game and played it all the time. A lot of times I would just go into the Character Editor for hours and then logoff, never even playing the actual game. If Brink didn’t have the customization features, I would still buy it, because I love SD’s team objective games, but then adding customization, that looks to be done very well, that’s just icing on the cake; they just added hours of replayability for a lot of players.
If you wanna call it a gimmick, then do what you have to, but it’s a gimmick that’s proven and a gimmick that works.