$700 million for this Call of Duty! New documents reveal ‘the highest costs ever disclosed’ in the world of video games

Game news $700 million for this Call of Duty! New documents reveal ‘the highest costs ever disclosed’ in the world of video games

Call of Duty franchise budgets are soaring, costs are monstrous

Now, for publisher Activision, the situation has changed. After years and years of producing new parts of the saga Call of Duty in its corner, the American publisher can count on the support of Microsoft. By buying the company, the Redmond firm offered itself a large portfolio of video game productions, and it did not hesitate to quickly include it in its Game Pass subscription, as evidenced by the Day One availability of COD : Black Ops 6 on this service. With this episode, we had the feeling that the developers at Treyarch had pulled out all the stops, but this is not the first time that Activision has blown the budget!

If developers and publishers are very often inclined to share encrypted data after the release of a game, in particular to highlight sales scores, it’s not the same when it comes to officially revealing production budgets. Recently, quite a discovery was made about the development costs and sales figures of certain episodes of the saga Call of Duty. It was by getting hold of a court document that one of the industry’s best-kept secrets was exposed. If we were wide-eyed at the budget of The Last of Us Part II A few years ago, the amounts put forward for the CoD franchise in the report by Patrick Kelly, responsible for the franchise, are mind-blowing!

See Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on PS5 on Fnac

Budgets that explode over episodes of Call of Duty… and sales that fall

In recent days, Stephen Totilo, journalist for the site Game Fileshared information from a court document – taken from the lawsuit filed against the company last May regarding the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas – in which the current head of the creation of the Call of Duty franchise provided information on the budget and sales figures of three major and recent opuses of the saga, namely Call of Duty: Black Ops III (released in 2015), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (released in 2019) and Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War (released in 2020). The least we can say is that Activision has constantly pushed the creative limits by allocating astronomical amounts to these productions.

Respectively, in the order cited above, we learned that we went from a budget to 450 million dollars, for Black Ops IIIat an amount of 640 million dollars and 700 million dollars for Modern Warfare (2019) et Cold War (2020) ! On the one hand, if budgets have increased significantly, the same story does not apply to sales figures since they have gradually decreased, starting at 43 million copies for Black Ops III to arrive at 41 million (Modern Warfare (2019)) and 30 million (Black Ops Cold War). It should be noted that the budgets were not only used for creation but also include the resources to monitor the game and its life cycle. However, in his article, Stephen Totilo calls for “ some hindsight and some reservations, given the way such figures tend to be made public ».