Modern Warfare 2 cost revealed

[heruamon]

Reasonable said:
I think many commenting are simply to seeing the global scale of the marketing for MW2 - it was huge, probably bigger than Halo 3 (which was also huge).

Uncharted 2, Killzone 2, Gears of War, etc. all had much smaller marketing campaigns. MW2 was given the level of a huge blockbuster film, just as Kotick notes (little scumbag). Posters everywhere in cities all around the world, adverts, big billboards, etc. I can easily believe they blew that amount of money pushing this.

What I struggle with is the $40 to $50 million for development - to be blunt, that's too high for the game as delivered, and leaves me scratching my head in puzzlement. Uncharted 2 cost much less, delivered a superior engine that showed a bigger leap from it's original release, added coop and MP and had more locations/textures that most modern SP campaigns, plus extensive motion capture and more extensive voice overs. What the hell were IW doing with the money? The engine in MW2 is clearly only a minor bump up from MW, the SP campaign is short and features a fraction of the detail level of Uncharted 2, the MP is good but again doesn't seem to have that much content.

And for those implying the PS3 added a lot that seems very unlikely. IW already had the engine working comfortably on PS3/360 and have already indicated that they can share assets, etc. so in line with other development houses being multi-platform vs exclusive should only have added around 10% to the development cost.

Mind you, Ubi apparently had 100 or more staff on AC2, which I bet has a much bigger development cost than Uncharted 2, so perhaps it's more a case of ND being relatively frugal with costs vs content vs developers like IW and Ubisoft.

Either way though, I can't help but figure the game should have cost less to develop than that.

How much is it estimated that UC2 cost?  I saw the slide for GeOW2...it was somewhere around 12 million.  in 2008, these were some estimated, as reported by Ubi, so it is interresting to see the cost dropping on top titles in some cases.

"..Leading on from this, an Ubisoft executive gave a breakdown of the company's average development costs per game - with a DS title costing between 500,000 to 1,000,000 euros ($785,000-$1.57m), PS3/Xbox 360/PC titles averaging 12 million to 18 million euros ($18.8m-$28.2m) to create for all 3 SKUs, and a Wii game expected to cost 5 million to 6 million euros ($7.8-$9m) to develop..."