Activision has publicly shared the budgets for recent Call Of Duty titles, making them the most expensive games ever made… that we know of. Unlike movies, you very rarely, if ever, learn how much a video game’s development budget is. And any time you do find out, it’s usually because it has leaked unofficially or via some legal process the publisher couldn’t prevent.
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In 2023, court documents from Sony accidentally gave away how much money the company spent making The Last Of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West. While Insomniac Games’ budget for Spider-Man 2 made its way online that same year, thanks to a hacking incident.
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Those leaked budgets were between $212 million and over $300 million, which is the top-end for most triple-A games. As it turns out, though, those examples are still much cheaper than what Activision is spending on each new Call Of Duty game. This past December, Patrick Kelly, head of creative on the Call Of Duty series, disclosed the development costs and sales for three of the more recent games in a court filing. The titles in question and their respective budgets are as follows:.
The figures for Black Ops Cold War also covers marketing costs, according to Game File’s Stephen Totilo on Bluesky. The filing in question was only recently discovered by Game File and, for context, is part of a lawsuit regarding a school shooting that took place in Uvalde, Texas in 2022.
