As spotted by the talented Stephen Totilo at Game File, we now have a better idea of just how expensive the Call of Duty series is to make, and boy, those are some big numbers.
The information comes from official court documents that were filed last month in response to the Uvalde suit which alleges that Call of Duty games played a role in influencing a teenager to commit a mass shooting which resulted in the deaths of 19 teenagers and 2 adults.
According to the documents, Patrick Kelly (creative director of Call of Duty) specifically addresses three Call of Duty titles that the suit claims the shooter played heavily: Black Ops 3, Modern Warfare (2019) and Black Ops Cold War.
The document then goes on to reveal the budgets for each of the games. I’d suggest grabbing your underpants, people, because the numbers are nuts. Black Ops 3 (2015) apparently cost $450m to make, while Modern Warfare (2019) boosted that up to $640m. That ain’t the cake-taker, though, because that award goes to Black Ops Cold War (2020) which cost a whopping $700m.
Now, there is a caveat to these numbers. While they don’t appear to include marketing costs, although that is unclear, Kelly does specify that all these budgets are “development costs over the game’s lifecycle.” That means they include development costs after release, such as producing patches, balancing the game, DLC, events and so on. These costs are technically ongoing too, since you can still play these games and they do likely have at least a few staff members working on them.
Regardless, those are some staggering numbers, and presumably the costs have only risen with the newer titles. After all, rising development costs are one of the biggest problems the industry is currently facing. Triple-A titles are taking longer to make and costing more.
It’s difficult to ascertain whether this would officially make the Call of Duty titles the most expensive games ever made, although they are certainly up there. But for some comparisons, leaked Sony documents revealed that The Last of Us Part 2 cost $220m to make. The upcoming Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 from Insomniac has been estimated at anywhere from $280-350m. And then, of course, there’s Sony’s failed Concord which supposedly cost up to $400m to make, although it had a more complicated development.
Kelly’s revelations about the series’ budgets are not part of the direct response to the suit but rather a general description of what Call of Duty is so that lawyers can reference it later.