With Call of Duty being a yearly release and one of the biggest gaming franchises on the planet, you’d imagine Activision is willing to spend a lot of money on it. Recently, a new report from GameFile shed some light on just how much money Activision has spend on CoD.
The most-expensive Call of Duty, wielding the biggest game budget ever disclosed, is Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, which cost $700 million to make. It sold 30 million copies. Elsewhere in the Call of Duty franchise, we see that the 2019 Modern Warfare remake cost $640 million to make, and sold 41 million copies. Black Ops 3 cost $450 million and sold 43 million copies.
That’s a lot of copies sold, and these numbers represent the games’ entire life cycles, but these budgets feel quite tremendous. Sony spend $220 million on The Last of Us: Part II, which was seen as a ridiculous amount. With Grand Theft Auto VI looming as well, there are beliefs that Rockstar and Take-Two could have spent over a billion dollars on making the game.
What do you think about these budgets? Are they sustainable for the future of games?