The Development Cost of Call of Duty Games Has Been Revealed

The Last of Us 2's $220 million, Skull and Bones' $200 million, Horizon Forbidden West's $212 million, Concord's $50-200 million – by now it's no secret that, much like the movie industry, modern AAA game developers make a huge gamble with each title, with astronomical budgets necessitating tens of millions in sales and substantial in-game purchases just to break even, as marketing expenses alone can sometimes rival development costs listed above.

For various reasons, however, studios typically avoid disclosing the production costs of their projects, leaving the gaming community in the dark about how much was spent on any particular game, often making it impossible to accurately determine how much a game benefited its creator – or, on the contrary, how badly it flopped. Insider reports and obscure documents are often the only windows into this information, and luckily for us, one such document was recently unearthed by Game File, shedding light on the staggering spending behind Activision's flagship cash cow, the Call of Duty franchise.

As reported by Stephen Totilo, Activision's Patrick Kelly disclosed the development costs of three Call of Duty games during the company's response to a lawsuit related to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. According to Kelly, 2015's Black Ops III cost Treyarch over $450 million to develop, 2019's Modern Warfare reached $640 million in development costs, and 2020's Black Ops Cold War totaled $700 million over its lifecycle. Notably, these figures reflect only development expenses, meaning that when marketing is factored in, each of these titles could have easily exceeded $1 billion in total cost.

Despite those exorbitant numbers, each of those games massively profited their creators, selling 43 million, 41 million, and 30 million copies, respectively, not counting in-game purchases. Just how exorbitant are these numbers? Well, as pointed out by Totilo, they represent the largest development budgets to ever be disclosed by a game company, with only Skull and Bones' alleged $850 million and GTA VI's $1 to $2 billion budgets rivaling them, however, those two figures were reported by "anonymous sources" and should therefore be taken with a hefty pinch of salt.

Don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.