Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War cost $700 million to develop

With each successive console generation, we have seen the development budgets for games balloon into the hundreds of millions – with many AAA titles now easily costing north of $200 million. Even so, Call of Duty’s ever-present popularity has seen Activision pump more money than you can imagine into their annual FPS series, with the likes of 2020’s Black Ops Cold War costing an astounding $700 million.

As reported by GameFile, court documents shared during Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard revealed just how much money the publisher pumps into its annual Call of Duty series every year.

Since 2015, the COD creator has spent around half a billion dollars to develop each successive Call of Duty entry. Starting with Black Ops 3, this 2015 PS4/Xbox One title was developed over the course of 3 years, totalling more than $450 million in costs during this period.

Since then, the budgets have only continued to rise further, with 2019’s Modern Warfare reboot requiring over $640 million to develop (though MW19 did utilise a new form of the IW Engine, likely adding to said costs).

Perhaps most surprisingly, 2020’s Black Ops Cold War – which didn’t use the IW Engine – cost a staggering $700 million to make; more than any other game in recorded history. Of course, the games industry is rather secretive when it comes to dev costs and the like, and so it is possible that more recent entries have surpassed even these figures.

Regardless, it is interesting to see just how much money Activision pumps into Call of Duty every single year – even if returns from sales and microtransactions do ultimately make the cost worth it.

It will be curious to see whether we will ever hear about a future COD costing over $1 Billion. If it hasn’t happened already, it likely will in just a few years’ time.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of these budgets? Are they out of control? Does this put other AAA games’ $200 million budgets into greater perspective? Let us know down below.

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