Call of Duty and Some Other AAA Franchises Have a Budget of Over $300 Million - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 May 2023 / 5,142 Views
The UK regulator, Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), in its final report on Microsoft’s $67.8 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which it blocked over concerns with cloud gaming, revealed some of the biggest AAA video game franchises like Call of Duty have budgets of over $300 million.
Five years ago, the majority of AAA games on consoles and PC had development budget between $50 million and $150 million, according to a report submitted by IDG to the CMA. AAA games that are expected to release in 2024 and 2025 have approved development budgets of $200 million or more.
Grand Theft Auto VI is expected to have a budget of $250 million or more.
"We have to make so much content for Call of Duty, that we can’t even lean on one lead studio anymore. Now we need almost 1.5 lead studios for each annual CoD," said Activision in the report. "That kind of bandwidth pressure is forcing us to use outsourcers more and more. I don’t see that changing anytime soon."
A publisher that remained anonymous stated that the overall figures for development ad marketing costs for major brans in its recent installments are approximately €150 million for pre-launch development and €50 million for launch marketing.
Another publisher said development costs for its major AAA franchises range between over $80 million to nearly $350 million. Marketing costs reach up to $310 million.
One publisher stated one of its major franchise's cost $660 million to develop and marketing costs peaked at nearly $550 million. That is a total of well over $1 billion between development and marketing.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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I look at Nintendo and I like their strategy.
So some games have a bigger development and marketing budget than the biggest movies ever. Wild!
$550M marketing cost... this is another aspect where GamePass can shine, it help alleviate some of those cost by doubling it as its own marketing tool at no extra cost. And this will only get better as user base grows.
