While you may have qualms about the yearly releases of Call of Duty, that has not stopped the franchise from continuing to dominate the gaming landscape whenever it’s time to dive into first-person shooting to save the day. And all of that success comes at a hefty cost for Activision, as revealed in legal documents.
Information about the development budget for the Call of Duty series surfaced via documents submitted by Activision in response to the 2022 Texas school shooting case, as reported by GameFile.
For context, this development budget does not only refer to pre-release costs but also post-release expenses for supporting content, considering Call of Duty can now be categorised as a live-service game. This represents the costs for the entire lifecycle of the series.
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (2015) required approximately US$450 million for development, selling 43 million copies.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Reboot (2019) cost around US$640 million and sold 41 million copies.
- The most expensive on this list is Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) by Treyarch, which spent up to US4700 million on development, with around 30 million copies sold.
What’s even more astonishing is that the figures do not yet account for the marketing budgets allocated by Activision for each title, which is a lot of money as the scale and scope seemingly grow with each entry.
In comparison, the likes of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II cost around US$200 million, Horizon Forbidden West from Guerrilla Games took US$212 million, and Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 incur costs of US$300 million. But these are not live-service games, which will dramatically reduce the need for post-launch development costs.
The spiralling costs are a hot topic within the industry, but perhaps no title comes close to what the Call of Duty franchise entails. For now, the profits brought in seem justified, but It remains to be seen just how long this climb can last, and if it’s healthy for the industry as a whole.
