As game development budgets continue to rise, it's perhaps no surprise that churning out a big AAA shooter every year is a pricey endeavour. For well over a decade, Activision's Call of Duty has been the biggest AAA shooter of them all - and a new report details some of the eyewatering budgets that have gone into making COD over the last 10 years.
In a court filing reviewed by outlet Game File, an Activision exec detailed some specific game dev costs for three recent Call of Duty titles. The site then mentions that these figures are higher than any we've ever heard of from other big-budget game releases.
Here are the three games mentioned and their respective budgets:
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (2015) - $450 million
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) - $640 million
- Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) - $700 million
To give some context, Game File adds that Sony's The Last Of Us: Part 2 cost the PlayStation owner roughly $220 million - less than half of any of the COD titles mentioned above.
Unfortunately, the report doesn't namedrop any of the Call of Duty releases that have happened since Microsoft took over Activision in 2023, but we can only imagine that they've risen even higher in a post-pandemic world. Even so, the Xbox owner has committed to sticking with the current COD development structure in place at these ActiBlizz studios.