I am working on a project where I am looking into the possibilities of crowdsourcing a game concept.

I am not sure how that would work out, but say I was looking into some sort of a hunting game, not unlike games like Deer Hunter, etc., but with real world locations.

An advantage I see with crowdsourcing is that people might contribute with heightmaps and adding environments from their own back yard. Both an advantage and disadvantage might however be the amount of data collected. It might come out huge instead of the individual player uploading their own locations locally.

My selling point could be that it would be familiar places, which in many cases is fun on its own, so by adding real world locations, with hopefully some extra details other than simple heightmaps, that is something that points me in the direction of crowdsourcing. It would also be a possibility for collecting multiple locations, with possible landmarks, details, etc., in a way more effective way than creating the locations I am familiar with on my own.

For any type of projects, I think crowdsourcing could be a great and effective asset, but it would also depend upon trusting the data collected. It would in many cases be hard to control quality, so how could you both “sell” your prototype so that people would be interesting to participate, but at the same time be able to keep control of quality? Could a better strategy be to ask for smaller detailed contributions to a project, instead of allowing others to work directly on/with the source files, or what would be the best strategy for taking advantage of the possibilities crowdsourcing could give? For any small indie developer, I assume crowdsourcing could actually bring contributions that one might not be able to gain on his/her own, so any experiences on what a good strategy might be?