| 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. |
Why is it reasonable that MW2 cost a heck of a lot more than UC2?
Some points I think are important here!
1. The game probably has quite a large group of gameplay testers to religeously test the multiplayer aspect. They would have been testing and prototyping from day one.
2. The game is programmed for 2 seperate console platforms and ported to the PC platform.
3. IW staff probably get paid more than other companies as they are a proved commodity. Activision doesn't want the whole group of them to up and leave to go work for EA do they?
4. They use a lot of set pieces. I wonder how much work it took to make it and how much they had to throw away in the end? They probably had no compunction leaving whole segments of the game on the cutting room floor.
Tease.
