Call of Duty's development budget ballooned by $250 million between 2015 and 2020 to an eye-watering $700 million

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(Image credit: Activision)

Characters with guns next to a train

The budget figures were disclosed in December 2024 court filings related to ongoinglawsuits 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 inActivision’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:

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, theydon’tinclude 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 cites2023 court filingsthat 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 ofescalating premium battle pass tiers, guns covered inglowing pumpkin flesh, and reviledSquid Game crossover skinsthat cost $28?

Without more recent sales figures, we can only guess, even if Call of Duty remains one of themost-played games on Steam—but after watching how Concord’s poor reception led to the rapidcollapse 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.

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