Absolutely insane.
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)
$700m to market the same game year in year out
It apparently works well enough.
These numbers sound insane. I wonder how it compares to the developpment costs of other big games.
I also wonder how it conpares to the cost of similar games like Killzone 3 or Gears Of War from 15 years ago.
Current AAA titles almost certainly have comparable development costs.
If you have 1,000 FTEs with a blended per-FTE annual cost of $100 K (I would argue this could be higher in North America and Western Europe) that works out to $100 M per year of development.
Killzone 3 spent too much R&D on PS Move for costs to be recouped
I wonder if they’re doing some Hollywood accounting because that seems way too expensive even with hundreds of staff. Maybe I’m out of touch with dev costs though.
Hollywood accounting to go with their massive install size.
I mean, factoring in advertising costs and shit, especially with a huge advertising push, could make that total number rise dramatically. And when you actually have the government pumping you full of money, you find ways to spend it. When other games end up asking themselves if they can afford to ____ because the timeline is _____, this kind of production gets to say, “do it. Hire more people.” And it doesn’t have to involve crunch.
I thought about marketing costs, but the article specifically calls it out as developmental costs (at least before the paywall). Maybe that term bundles marketing too.
All that money and updates still require restarts.
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?
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.
Cold War had an absolutely banging Campaign… especially with multiple endings
Sounds sustainable af
For call of duty it most definitely is. Take a look at their revenue sometime
Yeah it really makes me think something has to change.
Especially since an Fps should cost less than open world with lots of characters and locations.
Wonder where the money goes, considering the fact that a lot of the core gameplay code could be reused.
Also how has Black Ops 6, which presumably cost at least a billion to make, STILL not managed to make their free-for-all mode actually work??
