5 minutes ago, 0r0d said:

On the code side, having possibly thousands of programmers all working on the same engine, tools, and game code sounds like a freakin' nightmare.

I laughed my friggin ass off when I read this. Yeah that would be god awful. I also feel that many of those AAA devs have very effective skills and techniques that can make an ordinary game so much better than even twice the amount of amateurs can do. It isn't really about numbers so much as skill. Game Development is hard BECAUSE you need skill, patience, and practice. 1000 amateurs would not get much more done than 100. They just might do it faster. Plus, you would have to pay all of those amateurs either in salary or royalty, which would be terrifying.

48 minutes ago, Novadude987 said:

I laughed my friggin ass off when I read this. Yeah that would be god awful. I also feel that many of those AAA devs have very effective skills and techniques that can make an ordinary game so much better than even twice the amount of amateurs can do. It isn't really about numbers so much as skill. Game Development is hard BECAUSE you need skill, patience, and practice. 1000 amateurs would not get much more done than 100. They just might do it faster. Plus, you would have to pay all of those amateurs either in salary or royalty, which would be terrifying.

Even if all those amateurs collectively have the same knowledge/experience (or more so) as the professional developers, the problem is that they would just get in each others' way. 

Even if they could agree on a leadership structure, with one person having a vision for the code architecture and then subdividing tasks and responsibilities, how do you effectively divide things into that many programmers?  You cant really.  And if you did, keeping all of them organized would be full time jobs for a lot of them, and the ones working under that structure would probably quickly become disillusioned and unhappy with what they're working on... especially since a significant chunk of time would be spent dealing with shit that others broke, or arguing with your immediate supervisor because you want to implement your small sub-system in a way that conflicts with the way 10 other guys are implementing their different small sub-systems that interact with your sub-system... oh and you're still waiting for dependencies from 10 other guys who havent done their work yet, and another 10 guys are pissed at you because YOU havent finished your work that they're waiting on.   And also btw a few hundred designers just decided that the game design should radically change, and how there's a civil war among the designers to see which group wins.  As far as the artists... well the tools have been broken for  a couple of weeks, so... they're all just getting high. 

It's just a total nightmare.

I'll bet my money on the 250 professionals any day over the 250,000 total novices.

With 250 professionals, you have a large team of people who are experienced and organized. Each seasoned professional you add to a team is a force multiplier, provided you have the infrastructure to effectively organize and manage them. In this case, whole whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

If you have a team of a quarter million people who don't know what they're doing -- give it three years and you'll still have a team of a quarter million clueless people with zero progress. Sheer numbers does not make up for lack of skill or expertise. This can probably be applied to many industries. I imagine 250,000 clueless people working to assemble an airliner wouldn't get very far without spending significant time developing the required expertise.

I bet... in the case of game development, you'd have greater chances of success with a team of 25 novices than a team of 250,000 novices. There's probably a point where adding more people to the team is overall more detrimental than beneficial.

In a way, this is how the table top game Star Fleet Battles was made.  Over the years there have been hundreds of "designers" who have contributed to that game.  I don't see this working out well if just anyone can do anything they want to the game.  But with a single "God" at the top of the pyramid deciding which additions are worthy to add, and maybe altering to blend with the original designer's taste and style, this could definitely work and already has in the past.  Don't look at it as "anyone can change the game", look at is as "anyone can submit something too me to add to the game".  In that case, this can work very well.  

Slayemin... my money would be on one professional ("One Vision";-) organizing 250,000 gamers to provide that one professional with game elements to pick and choose from;-)

Thanks for all the great answers.

One last question from me. What if you added crowd funding to the mix?

Being able to contribute, getting membership, costs $1 a year, and that $1 is then used to pay a couple of professionals to direct it all.

Thanks

Do we really need a director? The internet works without one.

But of course we need a big guy on top who takes all the money! Probably more than $1, and per month, not per year, see MMOs.

And to make it a bit more interesting: Use a voting system and honor good contributors with some cents.

1 hour ago, David george said:

Thanks for all the great answers.

One last question from me. What if you added crowd funding to the mix?

Being able to contribute, getting membership, costs $1 a year, and that $1 is then used to pay a couple of professionals to direct it all.

 

Thanks

I don't know if any professionals out there would want to punish themselves by directing so many monkeys...

3 hours ago, Novadude987 said:

I don't know if any professionals out there would want to punish themselves by directing so many monkeys...

Heheh, was my first thought too.

4 hours ago, Novadude987 said:

I don't know if any professionals out there would want to punish themselves by directing so many monkeys...

Yup.  I'm sure we all know what a pain it is when you get a new person into a team and you have to train them.  It's a time sink even when that person is an experienced developer.  Now imagine thousands of inexperienced people coming in.  Even if I had a team of 100 pros to deal with it, they'd spend all their time dealing with the novices and trying to get them up to speed.  But even after they're all up to speed, they're still novices and will be doing more damage than good.

I'll take a team of 10 good, experienced developers over 100,000 novices any day.   With 10 good people I can have a good (although small) game in a year.  With that many novices, I doubt you will ever ship a decent project... no matter how many years you allow.

6 hours ago, David george said:

Being able to contribute, getting membership, costs $1 a year, and that $1 is then used to pay a couple of professionals to direct it all.

You would loose most interest in the idea. People can already make games for free, why pay a fee to do the same thing for none profit or any real benefit to the person paying.

Telling them that it's for a chance to work with professionals won't help, lots of amateur developers feel pressure when working with a professional. Hobby developers don't want structures or if they do it's because they want to be at the top; they don't want to think of game development as work.

Your best hope would be to arrange something like twitch plays pokemon or the Reddit April fools day(2017) experiment.