Call of Duty's development budget ballooned by $250 million between 2015 and 2020 to an eye-watering $700 million
Games are only ever getting more expensive to make. It's a truth noted by game developers, called a "death sentence" by former publishing chairmen, and conveniently cited by studio executives as they explain why they need to lay off another 200 employees. Despite the universal agreement that game development costs are rising, we rarely see exactly how much more costly they've become, especially for AAA releases. This week, however, thanks to court filings obtained by Stephen Totilo's Game File, we've gotten a glimpse at the staggering production budgets demanded by Call of Duty games, which—as of 2020—cost well over half a billion dollars to develop.
The budget figures were disclosed in December 2024 court filings related to ongoing lawsuits against Activison and Meta, which accuse the companies of "grooming" the shooter who killed 19 students in the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. As part of a declaration included in Activision's response to the lawsuit, current Call of Duty creative head Patrick Kelly provided budget estimates and associated sales figures for three Call of Duty games—2015's Black Ops 3, 2019's Modern Warfare, and 2020's Black Ops Cold War:
- Black Ops 3 (2015): Over $450 million in development costs, 43 million copies sold
- Modern Warfare (2019): Over $640 million in development costs, 41 million copies sold
- Black Ops Cold War (2020): Over $700 million in development costs, 30 million copies sold
The numbers are, to my eyes, a terrifying image of the funding expected at the costliest tier of game production. Between 2015 and 2020, the cost of developing a Call of Duty game had—in just five years—risen more than $250 million dollars.
While those budget figures include the costs of each game's year of post-launch content additions, they don't include marketing costs (which can, in some cases, be just as expensive as the game's development, if not moreso). As a point of comparison, Totilo cites 2023 court filings that revealed the $220 million development budget for 2020's The Last of Us Part 2—a number that, he says, "was considered huge when it leaked." Meanwhile, despite already demanding more than twice that amount five years earlier, the cost of making a Call of Duty game ballooned so much between 2015 and 2020 that the increase would, in itself, more than cover a TLOU2-scale development project.
While the court filings don't include development budgets for more recent games, the numbers indicate a rising cost trajectory that makes for some horrifying speculation. Dare I ask, if that trend has held true, whether the cost of making a single Call of Duty game is now somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars?
And if so, to what end? Are guys holding assault rifles interesting enough to spend over $700 million to render them in ever-higher fidelity? Are those increases in development costs worth boldly marching into the monetization swamp of escalating premium battle pass tiers, guns covered in glowing pumpkin flesh, and reviled Squid Game crossover skins that cost $28?
Without more recent sales figures, we can only guess, even if Call of Duty remains one of the most-played games on Steam—but after watching how Concord's poor reception led to the rapid collapse of Firewalk Studios, we've seen how dire the fallout can be when a major publisher doesn't see a big enough return after betting hundreds of millions of dollars on a single game.