CALL OF DUTY, GAME DEVELOPMENT

Call of Duty Cold War Cost How Much!?!?

⏱ Estimated Read Time: 4 minutes

Did y’all see this? Activision spent $700 million on Cold War! Call of Duty’s astronomical development budgets have been revealed, and Activision pumped 700 million into Black Ops Cold War. What is this? How does a Call of Duty, a game that comes out every year or every two years, cost this much? Even if they buy the developer, how the hell does that explain it? There’s no way server maintenance cost them $700 million. No way.

Cold War was a dope game. I liked it enough. I mostly just played it for Warzone, honestly. I haven’t even touched the campaign yet, but it’s on my to-do list. But how? $700 million? That’s mind-boggling. I think we’ve become so disconnected from these numbers. Look at this: Black Ops 3 cost $450 million, Modern Warfare 2019 cost $640 million. I would say they’re building Warzone up with it. Cold War in 2020 cost $700 million over the game’s life cycle. What was the last Black Ops before Cold War? Black Ops 3?

I’m just curious, couldn’t they have copied from the previous titles? I’m trying to get into gold in game, I’m hard stuck silver. Some games go really good and we stomp the other team, and others I’m the one getting stomped. To provide context, The Last of Us cost around $220 million. I understand that this game is big, and is being streamed. I don’t understand $700 million though. Is this just inflation? Is that what’s going on? These games copy so much of their stuff. Like, they’re not building a completely new engine.

Put Indie Games into perspective, where they’re building wild games on maybe a $3 million budget. $3 million is enough to support… well, it depends on what the developers are paying themselves. Say the developers are getting $100,000 and you got five developers, that’s $500,000 a year. $100,000 indie game that’s like bootstrapped, $100,000 ain’t that much. I know it sounds like a big number. These days, you’re barely middle class. $500,000 to developers, let’s say $200,000 just to make sure these guys are getting paid. Five of those is a million per year. So if your game takes 3 years, that’s $3-4 million. That’s not taking into account servers and stuff, which honestly, your servers aren’t costing you a million either. Servers may be $400,000 - $500,000 if your game’s bumping. If your game’s not bumping, your servers are a lot less.

$700 million! I’m not here to talk smack about the developers, but I guarantee you they didn’t see a fraction of that $700 million. This was all ate up by, like, was the marketing campaign even that crazy for this game? And they didn’t rebuild Warzone for it. They integrated Warzone into it. Warzone already existed. The movie Avatar only cost $460 million, with an estimated budget of $350 to $460 million. I don’t understand money. I’m going to be honest. I just don’t understand what these numbers mean. The money related to a lot of these costs just doesn’t make sense to me. I just don’t get it.

A billion dollars would take me 300 or 400 odd years to come close to making at my current pay grade. $700 million is pretty much close to a billion. Round up, you’re in the billion. I don’t know, man. We live in a wild world where money is make-believe, and it makes no sense. You can put $50 in a shitcoin or a memecoin today, and you can walk out a millionaire tomorrow. None of this makes sense.

What’s the most expensive Marvel movie? Let’s look that up. Age of Ultron cost $495 - $500 million, Infinity War $400 million, Justice League $300 million. So Age of Ultron was, like, one of the first ones? That’s the 2015? That was, like, the second one, if I’m not mistaken. I might be mistaken, and I’m mistaken on a lot. Age of Ultron was before Civil War. $495 million. So Civil War cost them less. Oh, Civil War is a Captain America movie, not an Avengers movie. Again, what do I know? These numbers just seem so ridiculously high. Honestly, money just doesn’t make sense to me anymore.

I remember growing up, anyone with a million dollars was considered insane. If you had a million dollars to your name, you were like, “Wow!” When we as kids said, “Hey, I wish I had a million dollars,” part of us was being a little facetious in terms of, “Wow, that’s a stretch goal!” Terminator 2 budget was $100 million. That’s a pretty high number, too. $100 million USD, adjusted for inflation. Terminator 1 was $6.4 million. I can wrap my head around that. Terminator 2, $100 million USD. These numbers are not real, they’re insane.

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updated_at 31-07-2025
Ai Disclosure: The above posts were transcribed using AI tools. Some language may not have been accurately transcribed.
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