They developed MW2 for 3 systems so of course its going to cost more money than for just one. As for the marketing that sounds like that may be a little wrong. I don't know what Halo3's marketing cost but it was everywhere so I don't see how MW2's cost more.

But I guess Microsoft made deals with a lot of companies to cross promote so that may be why it cost less. Lets not forget that things cost so much more money now days than they did just a few years ago. Minimum wage increased so every company has to pay more now than they did as well. So who knows, its possible.

I am also pretty sure this $ was just a drop in the bucket and IW and Activision would be willing to drop this much on 10 more games if it did this well.

Great game overall i think the public can agree this is the best game this year.

Wow $50 million to make my runner up for GOTY 2009 (after Uncharted 2) and $200 min total including advertising/distributing.

So they made an astounding $350 million PROFIT first week alone? Holy hell.

they made a bigger profit than that... more like 700 million

lies. the 150m were stolen by the whores IW ordered while making the MP.

Didn't it say the revenue was $550 min?

Oh, then yeah. I didn't crunch the numbers. I thought you were talking about sold games. I was talking about shipped. But you were talking about the OP which is shipped too. Yeah... that'd be like 18 million shipped across all three platforms then

No they didn't make 700 million profit. They don't get 100% of the disc sales, since microsoft gets a cut and the brick and mortar stores are pricing it more then ab sells the disc to them.

So not only does microsoft get its cut, they're selling the disks to retail at a cheaper price then the $55 average price. Now I have no idea just hot much they make per game sold but it isn't anywhere near $55.

And movies are a very different beast compared to games and the comparisons are really silly because in america the distributers get 90% of the first week ticket sales which dimishes in a sliding scale after that. So whilst I film may only make 100 million in its first week, that in many cases translates into 90 million revenue for the distributer. In the rest of the world its generally a fixed percentage which goes anywhere from about 60% to 20% depending on the country. But its general its considered to be about 50% on average. So if a film makes 100 million in america first week and 100 million in the rest of the world its pretty reasnable to think it make around 140 million.

And the box office doesn't include Television rights and DVD/BR sales. So comparing a films Box office to a games gross really isn't a good comparison at all.

Remember that $550 million is revenue at retail. Retaillers and Sony/Microsoft both get a big cut of that. So it's probably closer to $150 million in profit for Activision than $350 million.

150 million of 550 million is a 27% margin business, which I think makes sense.

That is business.  You can't just do a game, and make it real good, and just release it without marketing. The game gets lost in the shuffle if you do that.