Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War reportedly surpasses Red Dead Redemption 2's huge development costs, with a massive $700 million budget

gamesradar.com:

Believe it or not, video games are rather expensive to make. Between development costs and marketing, it feels like budgets for massive AAA games keep getting bigger, and the price tags behind three semi-recent Call of Duty games offer pretty good evidence to support that. 

In a new report from Game File, journalist Stephen Totilo has shared the budgets of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Modern Warfare (the 2019 one), and Black Ops Cold War, all of which have reportedly been revealed by Activision's head of creative for Call of Duty, Patrick Kelly, in a court filing. 

Starting with Black Ops 3, Kelly reportedly claims $450 million was invested into the 2015 shooter's development costs over its lifecycle, while Modern Warfare saw a massive jump that took its lifecycle development costs above $640 million. The most recent of the three, Black Ops Cold War, also boasts the biggest budget, with over $700 million spent on development costs throughout its lifecycle. 

Although those numbers just kept getting bigger, unfortunately for Activision, sales apparently went down with each of those three entries. The 2015 FPS sold 43 million copies, while the 2019 entry's sales dropped to 41 million copies, and the most expensive of the bunch shifted 30 million copies. Obviously, none of those figures are to be sniffed at, but when you're spending that much on making a game, the more sales you can get from them, the better.

Game File reports that these are the largest development costs that've ever been reported by a major game company, and they are pretty wild to see – it's not often that full budgets are officially revealed like this. With Black Ops Cold War specifically, it might just be the most expensive game that we know of if you discount live-service behemoths like Genshin Impact, which was previously estimated to have racked up development costs of around $900 million and counting. Not long after Red Dead Redemption 2 launched, VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi estimated that