Call of Duty Games Cost More to Make than You Expect — Budgets Revealed
The cost to make a AAA game for modern consoles has been a major talking point over the last several years while the industry has faced record layoffs and studio closures. And now we have a look at just how much development for the king of the industry, Call of Duty, has cost for multiple recent entries.
Thanks to several court filings and Stephen Totilo’s Game File report, we have never before seen access to development costs for three different Call of Duty games—Black Ops III, Modern Warfare, and Black Ops Cold War.
According to Activision’s current Call of Duty head Patrick Kelly (via the court filings,) we now know the development cost for those three specific CoD titles ranged from $450 to $700 million. These figures were included in files for a lawsuit against Activision surrounding the 2022 Robb Elementary school shooting filed in May 2024.
For Black Ops III, the game was developed over three years for over $450 million and has sold 43 million copies since it launched in 2015. 2019’s Modern Warfare remake had a similar multi-year development cycle but jumped to over $640 million in associated costs and is now around 41 million copies sold.
The biggest documented figure is 2020’s Black Ops Cold War, which cost over $700 million to develop and sold 30 million copies. It should be noted that all of these totals likely include post-launch support but exclude external costs such as marketing, according to Totilo.
If you compare the totals from Game File, Black Ops Cold War is already the game with the second largest development cost of all time—that we know of. And, even with that, it is highly likely that number has increased even further for newer titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
At the top of that list is miHoYo’s Genshin Impact, which reportedly cost over $900 million since launching in 2020, with $100 million in initial costs and $200 million annually for additional updates and expansions. That is followed by Star Citizen’s ongoing early access funding rounds that top out at over $630 million, including marketing, according to Game File, and Cyberpunk 2077’s $441 million for its base game and Phantom Liberty expansion.
Some of CoD’s development costs were included in the various investigations surrounding Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, with an April 2023 report noting that reviewed data showed CoD and World of Warcraft “had significantly higher development costs than other games” from competitors like Sony or third-party shooters.
Looking at Sony, the biggest development number we have confirmation of is The Last of Us Part II at around $220 million.
This is important to note because the rapidly increasing costs of AAA titles are a concern for developers and studios because missing the mark on even one is essentially a death sentence.
We don’t even have to look very far for an example, as Sony’s Concord reportedly cost $400 million to develop across two different timelines that involved outsourcing work and ongoing estimates for post-launch support following Sony purchasing Firewalk Studios in April 2023. The premium shooter was shut down and removed from stores on Sept. 6, just two weeks after launch, following poor sales and reception, with Firewalk being closed on Oct. 29.
Even Square Enix publicly noted that the critically acclaimed Final Fantasy VII Rebirth had sales that were “not as strong as expected” as the company failed to meet expectations with its bigger games. It doesn’t seem like the industry can sustain these increased costs at the AAA level indefinitely, which is partially why there is a boom in indie games where developers can make smaller games with more polished concepts.
Sure, a game like Call of Duty is unlikely to flop because of its mainstream appeal, but without extra revenue streams, game sales alone likely wouldn’t cover the blockbuster’s expenses.
In 2021, Activision noted it had earned an additional $4.6 billion in revenue from microtransactions that year, but not every game offers those or will see even a fraction of that return to justify increased dev costs. That number has likely gone up too, but with a return to high-fidelity single player campaigns in Black Ops 6, the development costs likely jumped significantly as well.
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If you want even more shocking numbers, reports from the Financial Times (via IGN) estimate that Grand Theft Auto 6 could cost Rockstar $2 billion to produce, with an estimated return of $3 billion in its first year if it launches well and has microtransactions live.
Despite the big numbers, it is important to note that we don’t know how Activision breaks down each game’s costs since Call of Duty operates across a multi-stuidio pipeline and has expenses far beyond a day one launch. This is just a small look behind the curtain that we can use to compare against existing figures.
