Of the many high-budget games that get released every year, Call of Duty titles remain among the most mysterious in terms of what goes into their production. While Take-Two and Sony Interactive Entertainment may drop some budget figures here and there about their top-selling, most lucrative franchises, Activision never brings up the topic.
The annualised shooter, it turns out, is a lot more expensive to develop than many of the games we usually think of when we think ‘expensive video game’, and we now have, for the first time, an idea of just how much money it took to develop a few of the most recent Call of Duty games.
As revealed in Stephen Totilo’s Game File newsletter, Activision recently disclosed some figures about the budgets, as well as sales, of a couple of its most recent Call of Duty titles. The details were part of court filings made by the publisher in a case filed against it regarding a 2022 elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
In the documents, Call of Duty creative boss Patrick Kelly revealed that the budgets for Call of Duty games released between 2015 and 2020 reached upwards of $700 million per title. More specifically, the executive said that 2015’s Black Ops 3 cost over $450 million to develop, and took three years to make. The game ended up selling 43 million copies.
The 2019 Modern Warfare reboot was also cited as having sold 41 million units on a budget of more than $640 million. Finally, 2020’s Black Ops Cold War was the most expensive, costing Activision over $700 million and selling the least, at 30 million copies. All games were made by hundreds of developers at several studios.
The lawsuit, which was filed in May last year [paywall], also involves Instagram. It blames Call of Duty, along with the social media platform – in part – for the content that influenced the perpetrator of the mass shooting. The three Call of Duty titles referenced were said to be the shooter’s most-played games.
As Totilo points out, these are the highest budgets reported by a major video game publisher. They’re also well beyond the already high costs of some of the most expensive games ever made, such as The Last of Us Part 2, which Sony revealed in court documents that it cost over $220 million to make.