Is Crowdsourcing the Next Big Thing In Game Design?

An anonymous reader writes "We've all heard about user-generated content for games that have fixed toolsets — but this interesting piece on Develop has got me thinking about the idea of games production being opened to a community before development finishes. A new iPhone game (Aztec Odyssey) did that with its soundtrack; could someone do it with the game's art assets? Or level design? A great comment under the story says that LittleBigPlanet would have been more interesting if it was just shipped as a toolset with no pre-built levels. I'm inclined to agree!"

Potentially

[Sylos]

In certain circumstances, this could be an amazing and powerful tool for creating some truly genuine creativity. However, with all that power comes a metric ton of suck. This will take off like "player made" MMO's have taken off.

Re:I hope not

[plover]

While I agree that it would up the ante for crap games from 90% to 99%, there would still be more novel games overall. They'd be harder to find, hiding amongst the crap games like "Goatse: Hunt for the Treasure", but word of mouth would spread them around quickly.

( Trust me, you do NOT want to go looking for that secret level. )

LittleBigPlanet

[somersault]

A great comment under the story says that LittleBigPlanet would have been more interesting if it was just shipped as a toolset with no pre-built levels. I'm inclined to agree!"

And I'm inclined to disagree. I enjoyed going through the pre-made content, more than any platform game I've ever played.

Inmates Running the Assylum

[EXTomar]

Its fine to take suggestions and inputs from the audience but asking the audience to create the game for you is insanity (pun!). You will always need the team or the leader or the person in control of "the vision" to make the tough calls when there is no right decision to be made. One of the weaknesses in "crowd sourcing" is that everyone is ready to offer their idea too few are around for the repercussions.

Personally...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope the next big thing in video games is another video game crash and another NES like resurrection where gameplay quality is more important.

Re:I hope not

[Anonymous Coward]

I started writing a reply to your post and I have a lot of interesting points to make in this subject:

-pc game communities tend towards more technical people that have the ability and interest to create proper game additions, not to mention inherently catering to people who play the game on the same platform that they have access to development tools on.

-lower the barrier to entry creates the "1 tweet" syndrome, or massive massive amounts of cruft that is next to impossible to sort through. OK so you "crowd source" development, how do you "crowd source" QA?

but i found your post meandering, incoherent and mostly not conforming at all to the idea of the discussion at hand. next time, please do take care to read the article and understand the subject before posting a reply. i do not know why you spent 2 paragraphs moaning about epic, pc ports and bugs there in when we are talking about community development.

if i could, i would mod you down as irrational.

Re:LittleBigPlanet

[east coast]

You mean you actually enjoyed the content made by the people who originally envisioned the how the game should work and built the engine around that concept?

How does that work?

Re:The next big thing?

[Shadow of Eternity]

Or to summarize, the non-PC crowd has finally discovered what the PC crowd has been calling "modding" and working on in a large organized manner since about doom.

Re:I hope not

[grumbel]

The trouble with crowdsourcing is that you might get a handful of cool levels, but you won't get a complete game out of it. Games are fun because they work as a whole, have a carefully crafted difficulty curve, carefully introduced new items and abilities and a story on top of that. With user contributed levels you always have the problem that they start with the assumption that everything is available from the start, progress doesn't happen, the whole game loses coherence, its no longer a game, but just a random collection of levels and I really couldn't care less about those types of games.

Crowedsourcing however works when the customization is limited, i.e. everybody creating his own custom character works fine in MMORPGs, because they are enough restrictions to not break the game world. But for a whole game, no way for me.