Past Call of Duty titles have cost up to $700 million to develop, Activision reveals

by Danny Craig  · 
Past Call of Duty titles have cost up to $700 million to develop, Activision reveals
Activision

Activision has recently revealed the development costs of various Call of Duty games in court documents, confirming that Black Ops: Cold War cost a whopping $700 million to create.

The details:

  • As reported by Game File, the publisher revealed the development costs for 2015's Black Ops 3, 2019's Modern Warfare, and 2020's Black Ops: Cold War in a recent court filing, which totaled $450 million, $640 million, and $700 million, respectively.

  • The large figures cover the games' entire lifecycle, which typically lasts a full year and includes multiple "seasons" with new events, maps, modes, weapons, and other in-game content. However, it is worth noting that the costs do not include marketing budgets, which are likely in the hundreds of millions due to the size of the campaigns for each release.

  • The development costs of COD are significantly higher than those of other games with publicly revealed budgets. In 2023, poorly redacted court documents confirmed that single-player title The Last of Us 2 cost approximately $220 million to develop, while Horizon Zero Dawn cost $212 million and involved approximately 300 developers. On the other hand, live-service titles often share budgets much closer to that of COD, with gacha title Genshin Impact said to have cost an estimated $900 million to develop due to post-launch content.

  • The court filing comes from COD's head of creative Patrick Kelly as part of Activision's response to a lawsuit filed in May 2024 by the families of victims of the 2022 Uvalde school shooting. The families accuse Instagram and COD of containing content that influenced the shooter's actions. Kelly's filing is not intended as a response, but rather as information for lawyers to use.

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