Games are solely ever getting dearer to make. It’s a reality famous by recreation builders, referred to as a “dying sentence” by former publishing chairmen, and conveniently cited by studio executives as they clarify why they should lay off one other 200 staff. Despite the common settlement that recreation growth prices are rising, we hardly ever see precisely how far more pricey they’ve develop into, particularly for AAA releases. This week, nonetheless, due to court docket filings obtained by Stephen Totilo’s Game File, we have gotten a glimpse on the staggering manufacturing budgets demanded by Call of Duty video games, which—as of 2020—value effectively over half a billion {dollars} to develop.
The funds figures have been disclosed in December 2024 court docket filings associated to ongoing lawsuits towards Activison and Meta, which accuse the businesses of “grooming” the shooter who killed 19 college students within the May 2022 college taking pictures in Uvalde, Texas. As a part of a declaration included in Activision’s response to the lawsuit, present Call of Duty inventive head Patrick Kelly offered funds estimates and related gross sales figures for 3 Call of Duty video 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 growth prices, 43 million copies offered
- Modern Warfare (2019): Over $640 million in growth prices, 41 million copies offered
- Black Ops Cold War (2020): Over $700 million in growth prices, 30 million copies offered
The numbers are, to my eyes, a terrifying picture of the funding anticipated on the costliest tier of recreation manufacturing. Between 2015 and 2020, the price of growing a Call of Duty recreation had—in simply 5 years—risen greater than $250 million {dollars}.
While these funds figures embody the prices of every recreation’s 12 months of post-launch content material additions, they do not embody advertising prices (which might, in some circumstances, be simply as costly as the sport’s growth, if not moreso). As some extent of comparability, Totilo cites 2023 court docket filings that exposed the $220 million growth funds for 2020’s The Last of Us Part 2—a quantity that, he says, “was thought-about large when it leaked.” Meanwhile, regardless of already demanding greater than twice that quantity 5 years earlier, the price of making a Call of Duty recreation ballooned a lot between 2015 and 2020 that the rise would, in itself, greater than cowl a TLOU2-scale growth mission.
While the court docket filings do not embody growth budgets for newer video games, the numbers point out a rising value trajectory that makes for some horrifying hypothesis. Dare I ask, if that development has held true, whether or not the price of making a single Call of Duty recreation is now someplace within the neighborhood of a billion {dollars}?
And if that’s the case, to what finish? Are guys holding assault rifles attention-grabbing sufficient to spend over $700 million to render them in ever-higher constancy? Are these will increase in growth prices price boldly marching into the monetization swamp of escalating premium battle cross tiers, weapons coated in glowing pumpkin flesh, and reviled Squid Game crossover skins that value $28?
Without newer gross sales figures, we will solely guess, even when Call of Duty stays one of many most-played video games on Steam—however after watching how Concord’s poor reception led to the speedy collapse of Firewalk Studios, we have seen how dire the fallout may be when a significant writer would not see a sufficiently big return after betting tons of of tens of millions of {dollars} on a single recreation.
