In a court filing reviewed by Game File that has not been previously reported, Patrick Kelly, Activision’s current head of creative on the Call of Duty franchise, said that three Call of Duty games, released between 2015 and 2020, cost $450-700 million to make.

Black Ops III (2015): “Treyarch developed the game over three years with a creative team of hundreds of people, and invested over $450 million in development costs over the game’s lifecycle.” (Kelly also discloses that it has sold 43 million copies.)

Modern Warfare (2019): “Infinity Ward developed the game over several years and has spent over $640 million in development costs throughout the game’s lifecycle.” (41 million copies sold)

Black Ops Cold War (2020): “Treyarch and Raven Software took years to create the game with a team of hundreds of creatives. They ultimately spent over $700 million in development costs over the game’s lifecycle.” (30 million copies sold)

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

People saying that these budgets are too damn high, but even with Cold War (which had a huge downtick in sales number and higher budget than the others) it's still making up to 3x the budget back on sales. Why wouldn't they keep doing it?

[–] redhorsejacket 1 points 2 weeks ago

Cause it doesn't matter if they are still profitable. If you aren't MORE profitable than your last outing, then you aren't growing, and if your business isn't growing, it's dying.

However, I wonder if the premise is flawed here. In 1999, you could probably get a somewhat accurate idea of a game's profitablity by comparing dev cost vs units sold. However, with live service being the AAA fascination du jour, and Call of Duty in particular having a whole game mode siloed off into the free to play space, I question if "units sold" is indicative of financial success anymore.