Call of Duty's massive development budgets revealed: $700 million for Black Ops Cold War

The biggest development budgets ever disclosed by a game company, buried in a court filing (but found by Game File), along with updated sales figures.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Screenshot: Treyarch, Activision

The budgets for big video games are among the most closely guarded secrets in the gaming industry.

So it is surprising that, late last month, an Activision executive spelled out the development costs for three of the games in the company’s best-selling Call of Duty franchise.

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.

The disclosed totals are the highest development costs ever reported by a major video game company—and top just about any that have ever leaked or been estimated by analysts.

By comparison, a poorly redacted court filing in 2023 from Sony pegged the development cost of the company’s marquee 2020 game The Last Of Us Part II at around $220 million. That number was considered huge when it leaked.

Here are the Call of Duty development costs from Kelly’s filing, which Game File has reviewed:

• 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)

The above breakdown is based on a declaration from Kelly filed to a court in California on December 23. It is part of Activision’s response to a lawsuit filed against the company last May regarding the 2022 school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.

The Uvalde suit, which was filed in May 2024, partially blames the massacre on Meta’s Instagram and Activision’s Call of Duty, saying the company’s platforms and content influenced a teenager to commit the mass shooting that killed 19 students and two adults.

The three games for which Kelly cites budgets are among those that the survivors say the school shooter avidly played.

Kelly’s declaration addresses some details in the lawsuit but isn’t explicitly a response. It functions as an explanation of what Call of Duty is and how it operates, so that Activision’s lawyers can reference it.

(Last May, Activision expressed sympathy for the Uvalde survivors but denied any connection between gaming and gun violence. Game File will have more on the state of that lawsuit in an upcoming article.)

Kelly’s budget figures for Call of Duty are extraordinary. But they should be considered with some perspective and some caveats, given how numbers like this tend to make it into public view.