In case you didn’t realise how expensive modern game development is, these figures make it clear as day (Activision)
Activision has publicly shared the budgets for recent Call Of Duty titles, making them the most expensive games ever made… that we know of.
Unlike movies, you very rarely, if ever, learn how much a video game’s development budget is. And any time you do find out, it’s usually because it has leaked unofficially or via some legal process the publisher couldn’t prevent.
In 2023, court documents from Sony accidentally gave away how much money the company spent making The Last Of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West. While Insomniac Games’ budget for Spider-Man 2 made its way online that same year, thanks to a hacking incident.
Those leaked budgets were between $212 million and over $300 million, which is the top-end for most triple-A games. As it turns out, though, those examples are still much cheaper than what Activision is spending on each new Call Of Duty game.
How much do the Call Of Duty games cost to make?
This past December, Patrick Kelly, head of creative on the Call Of Duty series, disclosed the development costs and sales for three of the more recent games in a court filing. The titles in question and their respective budgets are as follows:
Call Of Duty: Black Ops 3 (2015) – over $450 million (about £358 million) in development costs – 43 million copies sold
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) – over $640 million (about £509 million) in development costs – 41 million copies sold
Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) – over $700 million (about £557 million) in development costs – 30 million copies sold
The figures for Black Ops Cold War also covers marketing costs, according to Game File’s Stephen Totilo on Bluesky.
The filing in question was only recently discovered by Game File and, for context, is part of a lawsuit regarding a school shooting that took place in Uvalde, Texas in 2022.
The suit, which was filed last May, alleges the Call Of Duty series is partially to blame for the shooting as the culprit was said to have avidly played it; specifically the three games listed above.
Can you believe Spider-Man 2 still cost less to make than even the 2015 Call Of Duty? (Sony)
It is somewhat shocking to learn that even Call Of Duty games from almost a decade ago cost more to make than Sony’s modern AAA single-player titles.
By comparison, Horizon Forbidden West cost ‘only’ $212 million (about £168 million), The Last Of Us Part 2 was $220 million (£174 million), and Spider-Man 2’s budget was in excess of $300 million (over £239 million).
Although Call Of Duty games are replaced each year with a new title they are filled with microtransactions that likely make them far more profitable than single-player titles – although the exact details are never likely to be made public.
You can see how the budgets have ballooned as time has gone on, meaning more recent releases like 2024’s Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 almost certainly cost over $700 million and are now likely to be in the region of $1 billion – especially given the unusually big marketing campaign for the most recent title.
Knowing the development costs for one of the biggest video game franchises in the world are so high suddenly makes the rumoured GTA 6 budget seem a lot more believable.
Last year, it was suggested the upcoming sequel has a budget of $2 billion (about £1.6 billion), which would easily make it the most expensive video game ever made.
It sounded ludicrous at first, but GTA 6 has been highly anticipated for years, to the point where costing only twice as much as a new Call Of Duty almost seems cheap.
Plus, GTA 5 has made over $8.5 billion (about £6.77 billion) in revenue since 2013, thanks to its re-releases and continued support for the multiplayer component, GTA Online.
GTA 6 is expected to follow suit with its own multiplayer mode. So, if Rockstar is going to be supporting GTA 6 for over the next decade and achieve the graphical quality seen in that first trailer, it will need an extremely high budget.
GTA 6 is too expensive to fail (Rockstar)
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