It’s hard to wrap one’s head around these numbers.
But lately, it’s becoming more and more clear that many gamers – and indeed, many gaming journalists – have no idea how much it costs to actually make a game, or that there are significant additional expenses such as marketing and shipping that aren’t included in the development budget (as is evidenced by many of the comments to this article, actually). Honestly, it feels silly to point to MW2 as evidence for anything in the industry, since it’s such a statistical aberration.
The real kicker, though, is that beyond the ~$50m development, the game had a launch budget of $200m to spend on things “(i)ncluding marketing expenses and the cost of producing and distributing discs.” Obviously, Activision was spending money to make money, and these high costs have been more than offset by astronomical sales of the game, but it’s still a pretty staggering figure. That’s not the most expensive game in the world – GTA IV cost double that, and WoW‘s yearly operational expenses are almost certainly many times that amount – but it’s certainly not cheap, either. In the same LA Times piece that revealed that there would be a third studio announced to the Call of Duty franchise, it was revealed that the development budget for MewTwo was approximately $40 to $50 million dollars. Activision has been triumphantly parading some of these numbers around like a peacock showing off his brightly-colored tail made entirely of money, but other numbers have been less celebrated – specifically, how much the game cost to make. In case you’ve been buried under a rock for the past month, you probably know that Cods Mew Too is a staggeringly massive game – not so much in terms of content as in terms of all the other numbers surrounding it. CoD: MW2 may have made staggering sums of money, but it wasn’t cheap to make, either – not only did its development cost $40-50 million, but its marketing and launch budget was a whopping $200 million smackers.
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