Black Ops Cold War
While the reality of ballooning video game budgets has led to talk of AAA unsustainability in the industry, rarely do we get a look behind the curtain to see just how wild things have gotten for certain major franchises.
Thanks to the incredibly sharp eye of GameFile’s Stephen Totilo, he managed to dig out the Activision-stated costs of three major Call of Duty games from 2015 to 2020, and among them is the most expensive video game ever made. At least one that’s confirmed its exact budget.
The three games are brought up in the court filing, which was part of a lawsuit about the Uvalde Texas elementary school shooting that was filed against Activision. Here they are:
- Black Ops 3 (2015) – $450 million
- Modern Warfare (2019) – $640 million
- Black Ops Cold War (2020) – $700 million
All of these are “over the game’s lifecycle” so that would include any post-launch content. But all of these are in a league of their own. As Totilo’s report notes it was a big deal when it was revealed Sony spent $220 million on The Last of Us Part 2. Eyes popped when it was reported that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 cost around $300 million, triple the budget of the first game.
Call of Duty
Call of Duty, of course, is in another category entirely as it is almost always the best-selling game of the year, every year, with rare exceptions like Rockstar games or the occasional monsters like Hogwarts Legacy or Wukong.
It is of course worth noting that these price listings stop at 2020, and adjusting for inflation since then, $700 million would be more like $850 million. And what of all the Call of Duty’s since then? That would include, Vanguard, Modern Warfare 2 and 3 and now, Black Ops 6. It’s easy to imagine any one of them could top Cold War, though we don’t have revealed, confirmed data about those budgets.
I remember recently there were figures floating around that the budget of GTA 6 could be $2 billion. It’s a truly massive amount, and if true, would dwarf these Call of Duty numbers that have themselves dwarfed other big numbers, but it is certainly not out of the realm of possibility.
GTA 6 is releasing 12 years after GTA 5 unlike yearly Call of Duty games made on three year dev cycles. GTA 6 is very likely to be the biggest game in history, if not in literal size, in depth and detail and certainly impact. Rockstar would have few qualms about spending $2 billion on GTA 6 when GTA 5 has sold 205 million copies and brought in at least $8.5 billion in revenue. It is very easy to imagine GTA 6 will no doubt out earn GTA 5 in the long run (plus inflation) so that’s still billions in profit.
Call of Duty can get away with something similar, but it enters an odd new phase in the Xbox Game Pass era. But Black Ops was just a big hit and there has so far been no slowdowns in releases. We’ll see if it can keep out-earning these ever-increasing budgets over the long term.
Read the full GameFile story here.
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