Recently Activision announced MW2's production budget which was $40-50m.Along with it they announced that they had a huge $150m marketing budget for the game.The figure is super huge as we all know.

Activision Started marketing  Modern Warfare 2 this summer and continued advertising the game through various popular sporting and other events.This resulted in a huge umber of pre-orders.Apart from this,they had a mega launch event on the eve of MW2's release which had a many celebrities in it.

The result of all this,the biggest launch in not only the gaming industry but in the whole of entertainment industry.

We all know MW2 was going to be a major sales success.Even if their wasn't any marketing atall,it would have sold like hot cakes.

The question here is whether it would have sold without the marketing as much as it did with $150m marketing campaign?

I think it would have sold well anyways but it could have not beaten GTA's launch and other  entertainment releases without the super huge marketing campaign.

Modern Warfare 2's success could prompt other game publisher to market their game a bit more.Also constant marketing is needed like Activision started marketing 4-6 months in advance

I think the $150m was for marketing plus manufacturing and distribution.

Considering that they probably shipped around 10 million units, manufacturing and distribution should definitely take a significant part of that, even if each copy is just a few dollars.

Still, it was a huge marketing campaign.

I think all the other makor games like FF,GT,GOW,HALO,GTA,MGS should have these kind of advertising budgets

$150 million marketing campaign for Modern Warfare 2? Can you please redirect me to a link mentioning that?

I think MW2 would have not sold so well had it not been for all the serious price cuts

Well that's a silly question. Asking whether marketing is indicative towards sales is kinda a silly question. I mean one can only imagine that if you could sell so much in that period of time without having to spend $150 million don't you think they would have done that haha.

As to the extent, seemed rather necessary to me. Halo 3 had $100 million in marketing so seems within the same range of a game of that magnitude.

it wud've eventually but not in the first 24hrs or first week...it's like a person who says to themself i want it, but i'll get it soon den that person keeps seeing the cool eminem til i collapse ad runnin over and over in between all his shows and gets all excited and goes I WANT IT! the day it comes out. But they knew the potential of this game and wanted to generate a first day and week record so they pushed all the marketing to accomplish such a goal n they were succesful.

they could make several new ip with that 150m

Honestly the only MW2 thing I ever saw was the walmart commercial on its launch. So /shrug it helped I suppose

And MW2 made more money than many IPs combined.