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.
Got any thoughts on these mammoth COD budgets? Toss a coin down in the comments section below.
[source gamefile.news]
Comments 23
Wow thats some serious budget.
I love these games, especially Blackops 6.
This shouldn't be surprising considering the sheer number of studios and staff they have working on it. But these are multi-billion dollar revenue games, they still make HUGE profits.
The problem isn't games like this or GTA6, they aren't really risks, at least not yet. The problem is games with massive budgets that can't support them. It's tough as you are betting 5+ years ahead with a lot of the calls. A lot changes in that time.
Although it's been a pretty boring strategy, you can see why Sony has gone down the sequels route this gen. At least they can have an idea of return on investment.
Cod and GTA are great and all, but I'd happily take shorter, more focussed titles if it meant a more sustainable medium.
@Coletrain Sadly WE are a key part of the problem. We (collectively) say we want new IP and new things but the sales numbers don't lie and more often than not it's the franchises that sell again and again.
But COD and GTA, and most of Sony's titles ARE sustainable for now, they make huge profits (we saw the break even target from the Insomniac leak, which they smash most of the time). The trouble is all the other AA/AAA games that try and match them and have huge budgets but DON'T hit their targets and fail, and it's studios and staff, as well as gamers, that lose out.
That's a massive budget for an annually released game that once the new one drops the previous one basically becomes obsolete it's a bit disgusting to me to be honest all that money just on a cod game but that's the world I suppose 🤷
I wonder how that compares to another best selling title, Minecraft?
I think the best company for recouping game investment cost out of the big three has to be Nintendo with games like Mario Kart, Zelda etc.
Their budgets will be a lot less and programming for a lot less powerful machine the Switch will help and then selling tens of millions at full price.
@OldGamer999 After nuclear Armageddon only cockroaches and Nintendo will survive nothing will ever stop them they are the gaming god's!
@themightyant yeah, it's a horrible vicious circle. Thing is though, yes I want new IP as a gamer but I don't want a load of shovelware.
The collective WE I think doesn't include the like of you and I; I'm certainly not spending my days playing CoD, GTA online and fortnite, coz live service can go suck a fat one. But I like the flexibility that Xbox brings, cheap games with reward points, game pass when you want it, PC integration if you want that. I just hope that the CoD or Minecraft profits keep going into the ecosystem to help with the actual good stuff 🤣
That's a crazy amount of money. Can't Microsoft skip a year or two, and solve world hunger or something?
It's obviously worth it considering how much revenue they generate but as someone who has been there since the beginning, they are incredibly stale and lacking new ideas/mechanics. I think out of the entire series I haven't paid full price more than seven times. Not once since Modern Warfare 2019. It's clearly like GTA V in that young people are in constant supply and the multiplayer is great fun when you're in school/University and have lots of time for mindless fun. I just think other single player shooters have done it better for a while now. Even the latest Black Ops was really more of the same despite what many reviews expressed.
@PhileasFragg That's the world the rich get richer the poor die!
It's a crazy amount money for a game that will be forgotten about as soon as the next one drops 12 months later!
That has to include marketing though, right?
@PhileasFragg I sometimes think like that when you hear of companies or individuals throwing money around like this. Take Elon Musk for example, the richest man in the world and buying Twitter then rebranding... why? Who did that benefit other than himself?!
I understand it's not charity, but I bet that money could've solved some crisis in the world?
Crikey, where did I go there? Anyway, I love the COD series and Black Ops 6, keep throwing that money at it 😁
That’s insane. You can only assume that current CoD titles are costing $1BN+ to make. That means they need to sell 20M+ copies just to break even!
Anyone know what sort of numbers has Black Ops 6 done to-date?
@Coletrain It is a tough nut to crack, and I don't pretend to have all the answers. But Publishers have to make big hundreds of millions of dollars bets years in advance and hope they pay off. Sometimes they won't, but as long as more succeed more than they fail then they can keep investing in new art / games.
The most recent extreme example of this was Sony with Concord a catastrophic and costly failure... yet they made record profits the quarter that released. Hopefully that means they can keep investing in making new IP and new single player games without MTX, DLC and battle passes.
But I DO play some live services and Minecraft is amazing, I'm not going to gatekeep what people enjoy whether it's things I don't play like COD, Fortnite etc. or things I do. Different people like different things, it's all valid gaming.
@themightyant oh yeah that's not a knock on people who play them, they're often well designed. They just come at a cost, and that cost is creativity, jobs, software pricing etc etc. it honestly baffles me as to why Fortnite is so popular (CoD I kinda get), but here we are. And I guess the games that do rise above the rest this last year have been pretty amazing, so I can't complain.
I also can't see how the cycle is broken. Game pass sort of alleviates it for MS, but my only real thought is that partial AI development could be a significant cost and time reducer. But I'd like to see jobs kept and used elsewhere if that's the case (I dunno, quality control or something)
@Coletrain It's not going to be a popular opinion, but while I think choice is good I also think that there are WAY too many games released. On Steam it's over 50 games a day on average (18,995 in 2024 alone). While I understand some of these are shovelware, asset flips or solo devs just finding their feet it's still too much for the industry to healthily support. Even the most invested gamers can't keep up and we WILL get a lot of failures.
Personally while i'd love to see more veteran devs breaking off to group together and form small to mid sized studios and making riskier games not just indies. We don't have too many examples of this working out yet, and good luck finding the funding right now.
AI is certainly an area of interest, i'd love to see what a crack veteran team could do returning to their game jam roots and using AI. But obviously there are massive pitfalls with this.
@Feffster 20M+ copies just to break even! , that's small change, they make far more than that(Billions) from Microtransactions.
Holy crap development budgets are out of control. This is not sustainable in the long run for the industry.
The price to make the games has gone up yet the stories got worse, gameplay worse and the graphics have stagnated.
All that money is on ai algorithms and making ugly premium content.
Is this the game budget or is it including marketing?
GTA came out and continue to make money years later. When it’s a yearly drop you only have that year to support to make money before next arrives. I think dropping to every other year would be good. This was first cod for years I’ve played from release. Really enjoyed it
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