Could have MW2 sold so much without its $150m marketing campaign

[Killergran]

Raistline said:

So that is a huge as profit for a teeny tiny dev budget.

60 bux a game for a total of 8million week 1 sales: 480million total revenue (rounded)
Minus 40 million dev cost: 440 milion
Minus 150 million marketing: 290million
Minus 10 bux for each game sold to console royalties (80million): 210million.

I think 210 million in pure profit is pretty much the highest I have ever seen for a single game.

While I'm not going to disagree with your conclusion I find the numbers you just presented to be woefully inaccurate.

The first day revenue reported was 550 million dollars, not the 480 you ended up with for the whole first week. The reason for this miscalculation would be that $60 is not the average price the game fetches. In europe at least the price converted to dollars would be much higher.

Then the end figure does not account for the markup that retail takes. Generally I've seen numbers here on VGChartz saying around $20-$30 is what the publisher gets for each copy of the game, after retail markup, packaging and distribution and console royalties. I'm not sure we can draw any conclusions as to how Modern Warfare's numbers compare to that however.

And while I'm nitpicking, discounting the production costs and marketing budget is all very fine if you expect the game to stop selling after that point. But if it sells more you'll have to take that into account or else you'll get a very weird profit figure.

Sorry to be so anal about this, but if you want a real calculation of the profit the game has made the quoted calculation simply will not do. There are too many guesses in that calculation.