Activision poured nearly $1.8 billion into two Call of Duty: Black Ops games and Modern Warfare development

What the hell?! Another illustration of how much larger the video game market has become compared to the film industry is the development costs of the three Call of Duty games. The cheapest price was $450 million, and the most expensive was a staggering $700 million, and that doesn’t include marketing costs.

Development costs for Black Ops 3, Modern Warfare (2019) and Black Ops Cold War were part of a lawsuit considered Game file.

The documentation states that starting with 2015’s Black Ops 3, Treyarch spent three years developing the game. Over the course of the FPS’s lifecycle, over $450 million was spent on development and 43 million copies were sold.

Next up is 2019’s Modern Warfare. Infinity Ward’s development costs for this game reached over $640 million and it sold 41 million copies.

The last of the three is 2020’s Black Ops Cold War. In the few years it took to create the game, Infinity Ward and Treyarch spent more than $700 million. It was also the best-selling album of the trio, selling 30 million copies.

A quick check of the list of the most expensive movies ever made shows that the most expensive, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, cost $447 million at the time, less than all three games. The most expensive productions in a row were the films “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Endgame”. Their total value was $1 billion, which is still less than the three CoD games combined ($1.79 billion). And remember that marketing expenses will further increase the games budget.

Not all of them were worth the money

Game companies tend to be very secretive when it comes to the development costs of their games, partly because they don’t want people to know how much money was wasted on the flop. For example, Skull and Bones was rumored to cost over $850 million.

As of now, 2020’s Genshin Impact surpasses CoD Black Ops Cold War as officially the most expensive game ever with a price tag of $900 million, but that includes $200 million added annually in ongoing costs – the original costs were only 100 million dollars.

Almost all Monopoly Go! the budget went to marketing

GTA VI is expected to top the list when it releases (hopefully) this year, with a price tag of over $1 billion.

Patrick Kelly, Activision’s current creative lead for the Call of Duty franchise, was the one who disclosed the expenses in a lawsuit filed against the company. The story is about the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

The lawsuit, filed in May 2024, partially blames the shooting that killed 19 students and two adults on Instagram and CoD, claiming they influenced the teenager to commit the murders.