Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Cost Over $700 Million and Sold 30 Million Units - Sales
by William D'Angelo , posted on 06 January 2025 / 4,057 Views
A new court filing obtained by Game File has revealed the development budgets and sales figures for three Call of Duty titles.
Activision's current head of creative on the Call of Duty franchise Patrick Kelly revealed that three entries in the series released between 2015 and 2020 cost $450 million to over $700 million to develop over the lifecycle of the games.
2015's Call of Duty: Black Ops III cost over $450 million and has sold 43 million units.
"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," said Kelly.
2019's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare cost over $640 million and has sold 41 million units.
"Infinity Ward developed the game over several years and has spent over $640 million in development costs throughout the game’s lifecycle," said Kelly.
2020's Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War cost over $700 million and has sold 30 million units.
"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," said Kelly.
The details were revealed by Kelly filed to court in California last month as part of Activision's response to a lawsuit against the company filed in May 2024 regarding the 2022 school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.
The lawsuit partially blames the school shooting that killed 19 students and two adults Activision's Call of Duty and Meta's Instagram. The survivors of the school shooting said the three Call of Duty games cited above were avidly played by the school shooter.
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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Aren't gun school shootings normal culture in the USA? How can they associate it with a video game?
If I play GTA, I am not out stealing peoples cars and robbing hookers.
If I play Assassins Creed, I am not jumping off tall buildings into a bale of hay.
If I play Sea of Thieves I am not piloting a ship amongst the 7 seas causing havoc.
If it's the "themes" that cause the behavior, maybe they should look at the mainstream news outlets who constantly showcase violence and crime and other detestable behavior 24/7 as that is what ultimately accrues clicks/viewers and thus provides an income. - They are also less likely to have a "rating" to restrict their viewing by those under age as well.
Pem, I think you have it wrong. There are no school shootings or mass shootings of any order in my USA. However, gun violence is a major problem in Australia. It begins and ends there :)
I love seeing the down votes. Shows you guys can't handle SARCASM !!!
What do you mean? I break every pot I can find ;-)
Theres 95k public schools in the US with 200 of them involved in a shooting in 2024.
Thats 0.21%... I'd hardly call a fraction of a percent "normal culture" under literally any context lol
200 school shootings is still not acceptable. (It's not 200, it's 288).
It's still MORE than every single other public school shooting on the entire planet, combined.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-shootings-by-country
No child on this planet needs to be exposed to gun violence, school shootings and murder.
Do you have a solution to the problem of school shootings in the US?
None that an American would generally listen to, but has been proven to work in most other nations that have implemented it.
I.E. Gun Control.
Australia has had Gun control for decades.
Australia has more guns today, than it did before gun control.
Australia's gun related crime is a shadow of what it used to be.
It works.
"Only 200."
Jesus fucking Christ.
A fraction of a percent is a LOT of dead kids.
in America its the guns fault!!!
So, then ban all guns. There, problem solved.
f#%! that!
You don't ban guns. You implement Gun control.
What's more important... Children's lives?
Or free unrestricted access to weapons?
Guns don't kill innocent children, it's the idiots who fire the gun, so shouldn't you make sure those idiots can't access them?
That is ultimately a decision for you and your nation to decide in the end.
My nation decided differently after the Port Arthur Massacre, we had enough and have been living a better society since.
CoD is at 700M budget!? WoW!! No way they are going to make It exclusive. Xbox/PC Just can't generate enough income, at least atm.
Also, If It sells around 30M... ~25M likely coming from Playstation/Steam.
It'll never happen... but they definitely would have sold tens of millions more xbox's if they had.
If xbox was smart they would have passed on ABK and wrote a 10B check for a few years of exclusivity rather than 70B, involving the FTC and inevitably killing there console business
Honestly, if they put it only on XBOX and it made like 5 million extra people buy an xbox it would probably pay off through people buying other xbox titles or games for the xbox
So the budgets went up but the sales went down. I played Cold War a lot. More than I would like to admit. I was just playing it a few minutes ago actually.
I thoroughly enjoyed Cold War - but my god playing it in 2025 is quite something xD
Those budgets are insane. Still, their return on investment should also be high, considering that they have tons of Mts in their games.
Even at a low estimate of making $25 dollars per copy sold, that's $750mil revenue from sales for Cold War, that doesn't include MTX.
Thats... alot. Then again, the game sales being over 30m surely earned them more.
It was revealed some time ago that COD's yearly development cost was off the charts. This is why they said the needed 80 million subscribers to make GamePass work. It's not just about earning back the 69 billion. It's about also inherenting the ongoing dev costs. They can't wait to throw their games on PlayStation.
30,000,000 Copies @ $60 Each = $1,800,000,000
Minus Cost - $700,000,000
Nett Profit=$1,100,000,000
We can shit all over these games as much as we like, but you can't argue with figures like that.
I know you're just doing a rough calculation but you would probably need to knock about $300 million off that for Steam and PSN cuts.
And then for physical media a publisher gets only about 65% of the sale price.
You are right, I saw the number and got a bit excited!
@$70 Each
I’m sure ease of access to guns would be a higher contributor than a video game. Typical Americans. Finding blame in anything other than guns for gun violence.
There's far more violence in the middle east and Africa than there is in the USA. USA is very civilised country compared to many
have you been to ney york city, chicago, detroit or LA?
Nah, it can't be the easy access to guns. It's the godlessness among the Gen-Zers these days, it's the lack of doors in public buildings, it's the movies and games that the rest of the world has the same access to, it's the woke mind virus, it's all the processed food we're consuming cause us to go crazy, but it can't possibly be the fact that I could to Wal-Mart right now and walk out with a purchased gun.
What we need is the Ten Commandments posted in every school in the United States. Maybe we should have a recitation of the 10C every day at the start and end of class.
That's sarcasm, BTW.
Well, gun ownership was far higher fifty years ago... yet there were far less mass-shootings. So it's not the guns, it's a societal issue. Parenting, social-media, the illness is out there, and our kids are getting infected. And we don't want to accept the blame, so we point fingers at other things. But it's clearly parental, first and foremost, imo. We use to love our kids and put them as top priority. Now it's like, take care of yourself, little Johnny. Mommy's got a wine date with her besties.
Neglectful parents have always been around. It's different now in the digital age. Parents should do as much as possible to be involved with their kids online activity. Why do these horrific acts happen so frequently? I would say it has to do with glorifying these deadly events. Like in the 70s with serial killers, they were talked about all the time and given tons of attention. Now the same thing is happening with mass shootings. There is a fine line between reporting the news and glorifying. We have "groups" that idolize these horrific events, which is made much easier in the digital age. I would say, the ease of obtaining guns isn't making the situation better. Everyone is a responsible gun owner until they aren't.
Care to post your sources? While you go and gather them, here's mine that says gun ownership in the US is practically the same today as it was 50 years ago:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/Guns.aspx
" Do you have a gun in your home? "
44 percent said yes in 1975, 48 percent say yes in 2025. The high water mark was 51 percent in 1993, while the low point was 34 percent in 1999. Doesn't seem like gun ownership was ever "drastically" higher" 50 years ago.
Here is another study on gun ownership broken down state-by-state from 1980-2016: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/tools/TL300/TL354/RAND_TL354.pdf
As you can see from the graph on page 20, five different major statistics and research companies indicate that the percentages on firearm ownership rate hasn't changed that drastically over time: the most drastic difference came from Latent HFR indicated a roughly 12.5 percent drop from 1980 to 2016. I guess you can call that "far higher" depending on how you define it.
In the breakdowns on each state (pages 31-58), the common thread is that gun ownership HAS decreased slightly over time, but the differences are so freaking small that it really doesn't fit the narrative that far fewer people kept guns back then.
My point is that adolescent/teen mass-shootings exploded independent of gun ownership. That in the US, guns have always been beloved, yet mass-shootings were not a problem until the 21st century, which points to a societal issue.
But the very first thing you said is that gun ownership was far higher half a century ago, intending to use that statement to claim there is no correlation between the volume of gun owners and mass shootings. Whether you believe it's a societal issue is one thing, but you can't just wildly make a claim like that without expecting an ounce of fact-checking.
It wouldn't be that hard to go do some research on not only the amount of mass shootings that take place compared to 20th century, but also the types of guns people are acquiring these days which would give some insight on what enables these mass shootings to take place. Like, I'm pretty sure that it's a lot easier to acquire an assault rifle today than it was in the '50s. I can go get one from Wal-Mart before the sun sets on this day. This time, I'll let you go do some homework to back up your stance.
I'm not on a world stage with a moderator. We are not having that sort of interaction here. I do the best I can, but I'm not going to read scholarly papers before every comment or post I make. I get most things right. Sometimes I get them wrong. But I'm okay with that. Again, it's not important enough for me to do what you're suggesting. I do not live and die by what is said on VGChartz. My self-worth is not on the line, here.
I'm glad that your self-worth isn't on the line; this isn't the place to measure that, and it's not my intention to make you feel bad or anything. But if your going to make such egregious statements in a public forum on the Internet, you might want to come prepared to back them up with a little more substance than "trust me, bro"
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