Every year, a slew of big-budget games hit the market, yet the production secrets behind Call of Duty titles often remain under wraps. While gaming giants like Take-Two and Sony Interactive sometimes share insights into their financial undertakings for popular franchises, Activision stays tight-lipped about its spending.
Contrary to what many might assume about costly video game productions, it turns out that creating a Call of Duty installment demands far more cash than most others. For the first time, we’re getting a peek into the enormous financial demands behind some of the most recent entries in this iconic series.
In Stephen Totilo’s Game File newsletter, it was revealed that Activision has finally let slip some financial details regarding its latest Call of Duty releases. These revelations came to light through court filings related to a 2022 lawsuit about an elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
According to these documents, as shared by Patrick Kelly, the creative lead for Call of Duty, the development budgets for games released between 2015 and 2020 exceeded $700 million each. Specifically, 2015’s Black Ops 3 required over $450 million and three years of development, eventually selling 43 million copies.
Furthermore, the 2019 reboot of Modern Warfare chalked up sales of 41 million units on a budget surpassing $640 million. Meanwhile, 2020’s Black Ops Cold War turned out to be the priciest, costing Activision over $700 million but selling only 30 million copies. These ambitious projects employed the talents of hundreds of developers across multiple studios.
In the same lawsuit, which also involves Instagram, parties claim that Call of Duty, alongside the social media platform, partly influenced the shooter involved in the tragedy. Notably, the three Call of Duty titles discussed in the filings were among the shooter’s favorites.
Totilo highlights that these figures represent some of the highest ever reported by a significant video game publisher. They’re astonishingly higher than those of other famously expensive games, such as The Last of Us Part 2, which, as per Sony’s court disclosures, cost over $220 million to create.
