Now, everybody knows that Modern Warfare 2 grossed a whopping $550 million worldwide in first five days of launch. But how much the game cost to produce? According to latimes.com, Modern Warfare 2 cost $40 million to $50 million to produce, but if you add marketing expenses and the cost of producing and distributing discs, the launch budget was $200 million.
 
 

Infinity Wards latest FPS game has managed to set a new record for entertainment media, beating Hollywood epics like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which earned a mere $394 million. Also, it managed to beat its nearest rival in gaming media, GTA 4, which grossed $500 million in the same time frame.

Wow I didn't think it would be that much in total.

Discuss

50 million for the game and 150 million for marketing and distribution?

wat

Yeah those marketing distro figs sound way high

40-50 million and the PC version is broken beyond belief?

Here is the exact quote from the original source:

No, most people on this forum seem to underestimate how much it costs to advertise and distribute a product worldwide

my bet is PS3 was a huge cost of that 50 million .

no wonder Activision bumped up the price of MW2.
Halo 3 had 300mln ad campaign so 150mln is possible. makes me wonder how much did KZ2 cost - afterall it's the most expensive game that had the most expensive campaign out of all Sonys games. i though it was about 65-70mln budget for the whole game development and about 30-35mln campaign, but now i wouldn't be suprisd if it was 140-150mln project. heck, even Left 4 Dead 2 had like 35-50mln campaign(Valve alone spend more than 25mln on it and there's also MS money). we may have more flops on hd consoles than we previously thought.

FF7 had a 100 million dollar marketing compaign back in 1998, that was 11 years ago. Seems quite plausible.

wow I didn't know Nathan Drake was in the cast.