Pushing the Limits of Crowdsourcing

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Within two months, 50,000 people became "fans" of the project on Facebook. A third of them stepped up to either animate a segment, uploading QuickTime video files to the Facebook app, or vote on submissions through the application or by creating their own fan pages. In the end, people from 101 countries contributed animated shots. Each person with a winning clip won $500. In addition, Dell and Intel, which used the contest to promote its Core i7 processor, gave away a Dell Studio XPS computer every week. In all, the sponsors spent about $1 million and eight months on the project. Landau says producing the same five minutes of film by traditional methods would have cost millions more and taken at least six months longer.

Open-Source Approach

Perry says it usually costs close to $1 million to launch a game. But by taking an open-source approach to the Project Top Secret competition, he and Acclaim kept their costs down to next to nothing. About 60,000 contributors used any software they liked to write game code, including several free, open-source programs. They used open-source forums (akin to online message boards) like phpBB software to host discussions. They also posted their files and artwork on YouTube and the forums, charted their process using a Wiki page, and used TeamSpeak to host conference calls when they actually had to speak to one another. In fact, the $60 a month Acclaim spent on the teleconferencing software was the entire project's biggest cost.

The contributors were eventually split into 20 development teams. The best team, as judged by Perry, will be given $100,000, the chance to develop the game, and future royalties from the title. One winner will be chosen to direct a future Acclaim game as an employee and will get the accolades and royalties associated with the position. "The first to submit a game we can test with the community—that the community response makes Acclaim want to publish it—they win," Perry says.

Beyond savings money and time, crowdsourcing paid off in a couple of other big ways. The viral effect of the Web created presold audiences for the projects before they were even completed. "They all feel ownership in the project cause they worked on it," says Perry. "They show it to their friends, post it to blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., and it spreads."

Forget the Contests

Landau and Perry both say the method helped them find talent. Acclaim hired five Project Top Secret contributors for full-time jobs running the development of other games, adapting games for different countries, and working with Perry as part of his team. Each position pays more than $50,000. Landau says getting input for Mass Animation from so many people around the world made the movie richer in style and substance. "I was surprised at how truly global it was and how well everything worked out, in terms of everyone using the platform and creating a universal experience," he says.

Both say they'll use crowdsourcing in the future, except they'd change one thing. Both would nix the contests. Perry says what was a "lovefest" at the start veered toward sniping. Landau says the finer details of animation were lost on novice voters, leading to a few quality-control issues. But the overall process worked better than they had ever guessed. Mass Animation 2.0 and Project Top Secret 2.0 can't be too far away.

Damian Joseph is an innovation and design writer for BusinessWeek, based in the Chicago bureau.