Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War cost an eye-popping $700m to make
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War cost a staggering $700m (£557m) to develop, a new report has revealed.
2019’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare cost $640m (£509), while Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 cost $450m (£358), according to figures confirmed by publisher Activision in a court filing, reported by Game File.
On the one hand, these figures cover each game’s cost over their full lifecycle, it’s claimed, suggesting this also covers the development of post-launch support. On the other, these figures do not include the separate amount spent on marketing, which will almost certainly include additional hundreds of millions of dollars per title.
The numbers dwarf the development budgets of pretty much every other video game we’ve heard about – though development budgets are notoriously kept under-wraps.
The Last of Us Part 2 cost $220m to make, according to a poorly-redacted court document from Sony published in 2023. That same document also revealed a similar $212m cost to develop Horizon Zero Dawn, with 300 employees attached to the project for up to five years.
Is Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War the most expensive video game ever made? Probably not, but for a relatively standalone boxed product, it is exceptional.
As for what is the most expensive – well, things get more tricky when discussing live-service games. Gacha-powered anime role-player Genshin Impact is estimated to have cost $900m to date, with $100m spent on initial development then $200m each year since. Typically, most companies do not divulge such numbers, however. (I’d love to know how much Epic Games has spent on Fortnite to date.)
“We need to address… the exploding cost of game development,” former chairman of PlayStation Worldwide Studios Shawn Layden told Eurogamer last month, when discussing the issues facing the video games industry today – such as a lack of originality due to the conservatism that comes with having to risk such huge sums making games.
“The PS4 generation, which was the last I was associated with, game dev was 150m if you want to be top of the line, and that’s before marketing,” Layden said. “So by that math, PS5 games should eventually reach $300m to $400m – and that is just outright not sustainable.
“It’s like we’re at the end of the 18th century, and we’re realising that building cathedrals is really expensive. Can we continue to build these massive edifices to God for this incredible amount of labour and time? Or should we just build four walls and a roof, and that’s a church, right? I’m afraid we’ve built AAA gaming into a kind of cathedral business, and it just can’t grow any further. In fact, it’s probably grown too far already.”
