Call of Duty is the best-selling game almost every year, but even that might not be enough to keep up with its ever-ballooning blockbuster budgets. New court filings reveal that 2020’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War cost $700 million to make over the life of the game, despite selling 10 million fewer copies than the one that came out the year before.
The filings were first reported on by Game File and come from a lawsuit against Activision and other companies by families involved in the 2022 Uvalde, Texas school shooting. The Call of Duty maker, along with Meta and others, is accused of influencing the shooter behind that tragedy through its products.
As part of its defense and in an effort to get the lawsuit tossed out of court, Activision’s head of creative for Call of Duty, Patrick Kelly, revealed budgets and sales figures for some of the company’s recent games. The information, rarely made public, includes the following:
While Activision did not share data for more current games, the snapshot in time suggests a trend of Call of Duty games getting ever more expensive to make despite selling millions fewer copies each year at only $10 more per copy (prices for most new blockbuster games went up to $70 when the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S came out in 2020). The data also points to this year’s Call of Duty, which hasn’t officially been announced yet but is rumored to be a Black Ops 2 sequel, potentially costing $1 billion in development costs alone over the life of the game (marketing costs can reach hundreds of millions more on top of that).
One way that Call of Duty might still be raking in more money than ever, even if it is still facing declining or stagnating sales, is through its popular crossover skins and battle passes. The post-launch lifecycle of each new game in the multiplayer series is now heavily monetized, with diehard fans spending hundreds more in addition to the base price of the game on special gun decals, emotes, and other cosmetics.
This month’s Squid Game event has been controversial precisely for that reason, as Activision charges premiums for skins from the hit Netflix show while also finding new things to paywall like premium event battle passes. How all of this pans out in the end-of-year financials is now impossible to know, however. All of that data went into a black box when Microsoft completed its $69 billion acquisition of the publisher back in 2023.
All we know is that last year’s entry, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, had the most players of any Call of Duty launch ever. While a temporary boon to Microsoft’s Game Pass service, it’s unclear if the franchise’s towering budgets will be sustainable under a subscription model over the long-term. Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick had famously declined to put the company’s games on subscription services. “I don’t agree with the idea of a multi-game subscription service as a business proposition going forwards,” he said during an 2023 FTC trial over the merger.
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