Massively ballooning game development budgets are among the biggest issues facing the games industry right now, and we continue to see increasing examples of that by the day. Unsurprisingly, it has emerged that Call of Duty – as one of the biggest gaming properties on the planet – has some of the largest and most eye-watering budgets in the industry.
Caught and reported by Game File, development budget figures for three Call of Duty titles were revealed by Activision’s Patrick Kelly – who is head of creative on the Call of Duty franchise – in official court filings in December. As per the filing, 2020’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War had a development budget of over $700 million, 2019’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare reboot stands at over $640 million, while 2015’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 stands at over $450 million.
Kelly states in the filing that those figures cover “development costs over the game’s lifecycle” for each game, suggesting that costs associated with developing each game’s post-launch content is also included.
That said, it’s also worth noting that these figures only cover development costs- marketing costs, which usually tend to be just as high as development costs for AAA titles (especially for something like Call of Duty), are bound to take the total budget figures radically higher for the three aforementioned titles. Then again, all three titles have also sold exceedingly well, based on figures revealed by Kelly in the filing.
This puts Call of Duty at the top of the list of highest game development budgets, though it’s worth noting that information on that front is scarce at best, thanks to the consistent reluctance of developers and publishers to disclose relevant numbers. Notable examples in recent years have been limited to the likes of The Last of Us Part 2, Horizon Forbidden West, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Concord, The Callisto Protocol, and others, though these newly revealed figures for Call of Duty put the shooter series far above any of the aforementioned titles.
