Of the many big-budget games released every year, Call of Duty titles remain some of the most mysterious in terms of what goes into their production. While Take-Two and Sony Interactive Entertainment may cut some budget here and there on their best-selling and most lucrative franchises, Activision never touches on the topic.
It turns out that producing an annual shooter is much more pricey than many of the games we usually think of when we say “expensive video game”, and now for the first time we have an idea, Just how much money went into creating several of the latest Call of Duty games.
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As revealed in Stephen Totilo’s game file newsletter Activision recently revealed some data regarding the budgets as well as sales of several of the latest Call of Duty titles. The details were included in a lawsuit filed by the publisher in a lawsuit filed against it over the 2022 shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
In the documents, Call of Duty chief inventive officer Patrick Kelly revealed that the budgets for Call of Duty games released between 2015 and 2020 amounted to over $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 develop. The game sold 43 million copies.
It was also cited that the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot sold 41 million copies on a budget of over $640 million. Finally, the most pricey game was Black Ops Cold War from 2020, which cost Activision over $700 million, and sold the least – 30 million copies. All games were created by hundreds of developers in several studios.
As Totilo emphasizes, these are the highest budgets recorded by a major video game publisher. They also far exceed the already high costs of some of the most pricey games ever made, such as The Last of Us Part 2, which Sony revealed in court documents. It cost over $220 million to produce.
