The numbers reported by Game File come from a court filing reviewed by Stephen Totilo. In it, Patrick Kelly, creative director of Call of Duty at Activision, revealed that three games in the series, released between 2015 and 2020, cost between $450 million and $700 million to produce. These figures can be explained in particular by the fact that the development budget for a Call of Duty continues to grow long after the game's release, since additional content must be produced for several seasons. The fact remains that the development costs presented are the highest ever reported by a video game publisher. Here is the essential data, knowing that it does not even include marketing costs, according to Stephen Totilo:
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Black Ops III (2015) : « Treyarch developed the game over three years with a creative team of hundreds, at a cost exceeding $450 million over the game's lifecycle. » (43 million copies sold)
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Modern Warfare (2019) : « Infinity Ward developed the game over several years, spending over $640 million over the game's life cycle. » (41 million copies sold)
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Black Ops Cold War (2020) : « Treyarch and Raven Software spent years creating this game with a team of hundreds of creatives, ultimately spending over $700 million over the game's lifecycle. » (30 million copies sold)
For comparison, a poorly redacted court filing in 2023 by Sony revealed that the development cost of The Last of Us Part II in 2020 was around $220 million, while that of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was reaches $315 million in 2023. Already significant amounts (even if we know thanks to another leak that these titles were very easily profitable, like most big productions PlayStation), but which are therefore nothing compared to the money that Activision must invest each year to produce (and especially supply) a game-service like Call of Duty.
For the occasion, we also get our hands on sales figures which had never been communicated, which allows us to note a significant drop between the 43 million Black Ops 3 (2015) and the 30 million Black Ops Cold War (2020). If the Call of Duty franchise recently crossed the historic milestone of 500 million, the decline in unit sales seems to continue. In the UK, Black Ops 6's start was down 15% compared to Modern Warfare 3 (2023) and down 46% compared to Modern Warfare 2 (2022). It must be said that by releasing on Game Pass, the title naturally saw its sales collapse on Xbox, to the point that PlayStation represented 82% of the game's sales on consoles in the United States for the launch month.
The number of copies sold, however, is not everything: the profitability of a Call of Duty relies more than ever on its additional paid content (which, on paper, has the opportunity to explode like never before thanks to the strong exposure of the game to Game Pass subscribers), without forgetting that the franchise can also count on revenues from Call of Duty Warzone and Call of Duty Mobile. Until proven otherwise, the turnover of a Call of Duty quickly exceeds a billion dollars, which does not call into question its current profitability model, even with such budgets.
For context, note that this information comes from a statement made by Activision in a California court filing, dated December 23. The statement is part of Activision's response to a lawsuit filed in May 2024. The lawsuit accuses Activision and Instagram (Meta) of influencing a teenager to commit the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. Activision provided these figures to explain how Call of Duty works in a legal context, explains Stephen Totilo.
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