The PlayStation 3 exclusive God of War: Ascension may have cost approximately $50 million to develop, the game's lead producer Whitney Wade says.
"A mid double-digit million amount was invested in developing the title," she says during an interview with 20 Minuten (via Google Translate / VG247). That amount equals or is close to the budget of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a modern touchstone of big budget development. According to VG247, "A nice round ballpark figure, then, would be $50 million."
While it's a pretty big number,Modern Warfare 2 is believed to have cost between $40 and $50 million and the subsequent entries may have had even bigger budgets.
However, it's unclear whether that huge figure is solely for development, or whether it also includes marketing, promotion and distribution. It should be noted that sometimes marketing budgets are equivalent to or even bigger than the development budget. Modern Warfare 2's marketing budget, for example, was around $200 million.
According to Cowen & Company analyst Doug Creutz, Sony's first-party game God of War: Ascension under performed in North America and recorded disappointing first-month sales. The game came in fourth on the NPD's March charts and is estimated to have shifted 360,000 units, compared to its predecessor God of War 3's 1.1 million.