The development costs of Videogames, especially many of the AAA ones is getting inordinately high in the modern era and the recently revealed development budgets of multiple Call of Duty titles will surely convince anyone of this. Thanks to Gamefile’s Stephen Totilo, we’ve finally managed to get a real good look behind the curtains of several major Videogame franchises to see for ourselves just how much further things currently are and the state of giant AAA budgets.
The figures show the exponential rise of development costs in Activision’s Call of Duty franchise, starting with 2015’s Black Ops 3 at a total of $450 million in budget throughout the game’s lifespan and the shockingly high cost of 2020’s Black Ops Cold War which is a whopping $700 million, easily the highest developmental cost ever reported in the history of Videogames, at least on-record. At this point we could also speculate that the astronomically high cost looks to be a competition for the upcoming GTA 6 which seems to be the only title that can at least match Black Ops Cold War’s budget numbers or may even surpass it somehow. But till then, check out these numbers for yourself:
Black Ops Cold War (2020) – $700 million
Black Ops 3 (2015) – $450 million
Modern Warfare (2019) – $640 million
And to put these numbers into perspective, The Last of Us 2 by Naughty Dog was made in around $220 Million, Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 cost $300 Million and Horizon Forbidden West’s development budget was at $212 Million. All of these titles are known as some of the most expensive AAA’s made in the recent years, but Call of Duty is clearly in a league of it’s own, as of yet. However, these games aren’t live-services so these figures don’t include any post launch development costs which might be the case with the Call of Duty games.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is the seventeenth installment of the franchise and was co-developed by Treyarch and Raven Software.
