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..."

At least it made a profit.

That's half of what GTA IV cost to make

The question is...was that just for development.

No its not scary...its jsut plain wrong.

Halo 3's marketting budget was 40 million and i believe it was roughly the same as MW2 if not bigger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_for_Halo_3

"Licensed products including action figures, toys, and Halo 3-branded soda were released in anticipation of the game; the franchise utilized more than forty licensees to promote the game, and the advertising campaign ultimately cost more than $40 million."

There is no way COD marekting and distribution cost 150 million. I work in advertisng guys...

NO

FUCKING

WAY

If I can recall IW is splitted into two teams, one team is totally focus in doing the SP campaign only and the second team is dedicated in doing the online multiplayer..

Now my question is how many staff members are on each team?   I dunno.

I know I can do lots of things with that kind of money.....   $50 mil.  what?

I know right...$150 in marketing for a Hollywood movie would be nearly unheard of, but this amount isn't just for marketing, it's also for distribution cost.

People see 200 million and think they spent 150 million on advertising... this is false. Before they sell their game they need a game to sell... Basically they need to buy the discs, plastic cases, manuals, and various other things... or at least this is what I gather he meant. This is where the bulk of the money goes which they recieve back immediatly after shipping... Basically goes like this. You need to buy materials out of pocket before having something to sell. Once the final product is finished and sold you make back that money + some which you can A. use to buy more material. or B. consider it profit.

Only 40 million for a game on 3 platforms... is there any doubt left that KZ2 didn't cost 60 million... especially since we have figures for Uncharted, Uncharted 2, GT5, and MW2?

Movies can spend around 100 million dollars on distribution, advertising and making movie prints. Each movie reel you send to a theater costs 2000-3000 bucks. Games dont have nearly the advertising that movies have. As far as distribution and production...lets say they shipped 10 million units...that would be around 5 dollars per unit in paper, plastic and DVD. You're looking at 50 million dollars...

So advertisng 40-50 mil, pressing the disks and making the case 50 mil...another 50 mil left for??? Dedicated servers?? lol