http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-duty18-2009nov18,0,5238209.story

According to thi the total budge was 200, so you subtract 40-50 for dev and you get 150million for distrobution and marketing.

Honestly I didn't notice any marketing for MOW2 at all. I saw billboards all over the place for Left for Dead 2 here in LA (even on bus stops) but not a single thing for MOW2. It didn't seem to have any commercials on TV that I saw either, though I might have missed it (I don't watch a lot of MTV).

Really MOW2 was nothing compared to Halo 3 which had a special mountain dew, endless commercials I did see and much more.

MOW2 sold much better then Halo 3 primarily due to being a better game (it got pretty universally stelar reviews while Halo 3 was kind of at the high end of mixed) and being multiplatform, not because of any phantom marketing campaign.

That just means  you probably don't watch sports on US TV a lot, MW2 adds were all over the football game the week-end and on monday night preceeding its release.

Those are some of the most expensive commercials slots at this time of the year...

And the football audience tends to overlap nicely with the MW2 audience ( mostly male for starter).

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.

Yes, most of my numbers are on pure guestimates and simple math.

It is not exactly a detailed cost analysis but rather a broad mathmatical guess of averages to show how incredibly well the the company did off a very small amount of DEV funds in comparison to many other games that have at least twice the amount of dev. funds.

As such I guess it works, after a fashion.

I hope you don't mean God of War, as its not anywhere in that league of games you posted

those OTHEr games could recoup the investment, but witht eh sales GOW 1 & 2 have shown, a GOW game probably couldn't make back the financial investment of that magnitude....or maybe it could recoup costs but with not enough profit

if you meant gears of war....fine

Yeah, but because of the ease of development, Nintendo can have many streams of that level at once, while Activision only gets a few

On Wii quite a few, Mario Kart, Wii fit, Wii fit plus, Wii sports, Wii play, Wii sports resort, NSMB Wii, and who knows what else in the next few years

Might want to remove Wii Sports from that list, it's bundled, so going to be hard to demonstrate to us it has or will generate over 600 million$....( and when all is settled MW2 will be closer to 900 million$ or so lifetime).