Category: Video Games

The astronomical development budgets of the Call of Duty games were revealed for the first time after a court document confirmed Activision pumped $700 million into Black Ops Cold War alone.

First reported by Game File, a court filing submitted by publisher Activision as part of a lawsuit regarding the 2022 school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, included official word on the development budgets of 2015’s Black Ops 3, 2019’s Modern Warfare, and 2020’s Black Ops Cold War.

The court filing also includes updated sales figures for each game, showing the huge revenue Call of Duty brings in through sales alone and before its post-launch monetization.

First, some caveats. The figures detailed below include pre and post-launch development. That is, the cost to develop each game for launch, then the subsequent post-launch development costs associated with feeding the ongoing live service, meaning the development lifecycle of the game.

Call of Duty games offer a range of free content following release, including new maps, new weapons, and new cosmetics for use across Multiplayer and Zombies. Activision monetizes Call of Duty post-launch by selling battle passes, store bundles, and, most recently with Black Ops 6, premium event passes, released in the traditional live service seasonal model in the year each game has to itself before the next Call of Duty comes around.

The development of this relentless conveyor belt of content, which often includes high-profile crossovers with popular intellectual property such as Warhammer 40,000 and Squid Game, does not come cheap.

Now, onto the figures themselves:

• Black Ops 3 (2015): $450 million in development costs across the game’s lifecycle, 43 million copies sold
• Modern Warfare (2019): $640 million in development costs across the game’s lifecycle, 41 million copies sold
• Black Ops Cold War (2020): $700 million in development costs over the game’s life cycle, 30 million copies sold

To provide context, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us 2 cost around $220 million, Guerrilla’s Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million, and Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 cost $300 million to develop. However, these games are not live services, and so post-launch development costs are not necessarily related to the figures as they are with Call of Duty.

As Game File noted, these development costs do not include marketing spend, which for Call of Duty will be significant. So the true cost of bringing Call of Duty to market and operating it as a live service will be even higher.

While ever increasing triple-A development budgets are a hot topic within the industry, and have caused some experts to question the viability of these sorts of games, Call of Duty operates on a different level to most of its peers. Black Ops Cold War’s 30 million copies sold will in of itself have generated well over $1 billion in revenue for Activision, then there’s the live service revenue generated by the game during the 12 months before 2021’s Call of Duty: Vanguard launched. Even with $700 million spent on development and more on marketing, Black Ops Cold War will have been hugely profitable for Activision. You can see why Microsoft forked out $69 billion to buy the company.

Speaking of Microsoft, the math is now muddled by Call of Duty’s day-one launch on Game Pass, which some analysts had predicted would impact sales of Black Ops 6 but boost subscription numbers. Microsoft itself sounds delighted with the performance of last year’s game, saying sales of Black Ops 6 on PlayStation and PC were 60% higher compared to the 2023 release of Modern Warfare 3.

Microsoft has yet to say exactly how many new subscribers Black Ops 6 brought through the door, although CEO Satya Nadella has confirmed that Game Pass set a record for new subs on launch day.

However, Microsoft’s gaming business has suffered devastating layoffs, and Activision has taken a significant hit as part of that. Microsoft has cut an eye-watering 2,550 staff from its gaming business since acquiring Activision Blizzard for $69 billion in 2023. Xbox boss Phil Spencer has indicated the cuts were related to the acquisition of the Call of Duty maker.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Sony has announced a movie adaptation of Horizon Zero Dawn.

The collaboration between PlayStation Studios and Columbia Pictures was announced during Sony’s CES 2025 press conference. Columbia Pictures produced the successful 2022 Uncharted movie starring Tom Holland as Nathan Drake and Mark Wahlberg as Victor Sullivan.

Horizon Zero Dawn is Guerrilla Games’ hugely popular post-apocalyptic adventure starring machine hunter Aloy. No timeframe for the film’s release was announced.

During the same press conference, Sony announced a film adaptation of Helldivers 2 and an anime series adaptation of Ghost of Tsushima.

Developing…

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

The US Department of Defense has classified Tencent, a major investor in several big video game companies, as a Chinese military company.

The report from Bloomberg states that Tencent alongside battery maker CATL have been added to a list that classifies them as Chinese military companies. The designation itself does not carry any legal consequences such as sanctions, but inclusion on the list is not ideal for companies looking to conduct business in the United States.

As a result, while there is no immediate impact to what this designation means for Tencent, this is still a company that owns Riot Games, and has heavy investments in a variety of other game companies including Epic Games, Larian Studios, and FromSoftware. There are also reports that say Tencent is in negotiations with investing more into companies like Ubisoft.

Tencent has told Bloomberg that this designation is “clearly a mistake” and both Tencent and CATL will be pushing to remove their names from the Department of Defense’s list. Previously, Chinese phone manufacturer Xiaomi was added to the same list in 2021 and then removed from it a few months later.

In a statement to The Verge, Tencent’s Danny Marti says that the designation “has no impact on our business” but will still be working to remove themselves from the classification.

In a one pager published by the Department of Defense, the US government cites Military Civil Fusion, or MCF, a startegy it says the Chinese government uses to combine civilian research and commercial success to further advance its military, hence why the US government has a list of Chinese companies it suspects as working with the Chinese military, something companies like Tencent and Xiaomi deny.

Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Xbox is ringing in the new year by taking yet another step toward its promise of making everything an Xbox: by announcing it will add the Xbox app to LG TVs later this year.

In an Xbox Wire post today, Xbox announced it’s partnering with LG Electronics to bring the Xbox app to LG smart TVs in 2025. What this means is that Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers will be able to play games on supported LG TVs without needing a console, using cloud gaming tech. And yes, that includes Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

Xbox already implemented this feature on Samsung Smart TVs back in 2022, and added Amazon Fire TV devices to the mix last year. With the expansion to LG TVs, Xbox expands its TV presence even further amid an ongoing ad campaign focused on showcasing the ability to play Xbox on any device. This campaign, using the slogan “This is an Xbox”, positions TVs, laptops, phones, consoles, and other devices as Xboxes thanks to the combined powers of the Xbox app and Game Pass. LG makes several of the best TVs for gaming, including our overall favorite, the LG G4.

Despite numerous moves in recent years to spread its wings from consoles to other devices, Xbox leadership has repeatedly stated it’s committed to consoles as well. Just last year, it announced a mid-gen refresh for the Xbox Series X and S, including an all-digital Series X, and confirmed it’s “full speed ahead” on a next-gen console.

Meanwhile, rumors continue to pop up every few months of a dedicated Xbox handheld, though Xbox head Phil Spencer recently suggested it’s still a few years away.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

PlayStation 5 users are torn over how to treat their precious console between gaming sessions, with 50% choosing to turn it off completely and 50% choosing to put it in rest mode.

Sony Interactive Entertainment’s vice president of game, product, and player experiences, Cory Gasaway, told Game File that the Welcome Hub feature, which debuted last year, came as a result of discovering this even split in player habits.

“We gained a lot of insights about how players interact with their PS5 system between play sessions,” Gasaway said. “A small example is we had an internal hypothesis that far more people would put their console into rest mode than fully shut it down each time between their play sessions.

“As it turned out, it was actually about 50/50 between the two options for all our players. So, what that meant was for about 50% of our users, when they booted up, if they were in the US, they were landing on our Explore page. Those outside the U.S. would land on the page for the last game that they have played.”

The Welcome Hub was therefore developed long after the PS5’s release for these players who do not use rest mode, something Sony didn’t believe necessary until it looked into these stats. It arrived in September and essentially lets players customize their homescreen with different widgets and bits of useful information.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Typically over the holidays, thousands of people will look in their stockings or under the tree to find brand new Nintendo games waiting for them. But this year, a number of Nintendo Switch fans are claiming they unwrapped a far less pleasant surprise on Christmas morning: instead of a Switch cartridge in their game box, some are claiming they found a single googly eye staring at them.

Over the holidays, a number of posts popped up across Reddit and Twitter/X from individuals claiming their seemingly sealed, brand new Nintendo Switch cases contained a googly eye and a black piece of plastic instead of the actual game cartridge. Why a googly eye? The running theory is that the googly eye will rattle if you shake the Switch box, similar to how the box rattles with an actual game inside. And the black plastic around the side fools individuals trying to look through the cracks on the top or bottom to see if the outline of a game is visible without unwrapping it. Without these items, someone might be tipped off that a game has been stolen from the package, but this method ensures that no one notices the crime until they open the case.

It’s unclear at the moment how or why this is happening, on what scale, or at what point in the distribution process. Games reportedly impacted included Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Mario Party Jamboree, Echoes of Wisdom, and others. The reports also seem to go back several months, though there’s been a higher influx of them recently likely due to more games being purchased over the holiday. And all of them seem to include a googly eye and the same black piece of plastic, though at least one person is claiming to have only gotten the plastic, no eye included.

IGN reached out to several individuals claiming they had received googly eyes instead of games over the last year and a half, but no one we spoke to had taken a video of them unwrapping the shrink wrap and discovering the eye, as they (understandably) didn’t know they were unwrapping a googly eye to begin with. As long as all these reports remain unconfirmed, it’s always possible this is just some sort of viral prank. Still, through our conversations with the individuals claiming they were impacted, all seemed to be legitimate accounts. A few had return receipts or were able to direct me to specific Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Target store locations where googly eyes had been acquired, all located in the western United States. One person said they purchased their googly eye game online. Timeline-wise, googly eye claims went back as far as June 2023, though most took place in the last six months.

In an effort to confirm these reports, I tried to reach specific stores where googly eyes were allegedly found. One of the Reddit posters claimed in private messages with me that they had returned their googly eye box to a specific Wal-Mart store, so I gave them a call. I was unable to get anyone to answer the phone at the store for over an hour despite calling various different departments. When I finally reached someone in a completely unrelated department, they transferred me to Loss Prevention, who upon hearing what I was calling about offered to have me speak to a higher manager, before hanging up the phone entirely. Multiple calls back to the same departments did not glean any further responses. I tried a second Wal-Mart location identified by posters, where I eventually reached an employee in electronics who had never heard of this happening. However, the incident taking place at their store allegedly happened months ago, and would have been handled by returns and not electronics, so their lack of awareness wasn’t much of a debunking.

A very similar scenario unfolded when I tried to reach a specific Target location where someone claimed to have successfully returned a googly eye game. Repeated calls to relevant departments went unanswered, until I finally reached someone in an unrelated department who transferred me to Guest Services. Guest Services then directed me to Target’s corporate media line, which I have already contacted and did not receive a response from. All told, I spent about three hours on a Friday afternoon calling various big box stores, but learned absolutely nothing about googly eyes.

With the direct route failing, I reached out to Nintendo for comment, but did not hear back in time for publication. I also reached out to Target and Best Buy corporate for comment on this story, but similarly did not hear back in time for publication.

Wal-Mart corporate PR did get back to me on Friday, but the PR representative I spoke to seemed baffled. They told me over the phone that the company had not heard anything about this, and we spent the better part of the afternoon going back and forth over email trying to investigate. The representative said they’d look into some specific stores where googly eyes had been reported over the weekend and return to me with a statement by first-thing Monday, but IGN did not receive any further response to our inquiry by our deadline. We’ll update if that changes.

The takeaway from all this, then, is just a PSA that your recently-purchased Nintendo Switch cartridge may or may not contain a game, or a googly eye. It’s unclear if this is a real problem affecting many people, a real problem affecting a very small number of people caught up in a supply chain that has poor communication and no way to confirm these things, or a joke problem invented by the internet. Fortunately though, if it is indeed a real problem, it sounds like most stores are exchanging googly eyes for games if you find yourself the victim of this weird but admittedly quite frustrating switcheroo. Hopefully they manage to catch this Googly Eye Bandit, if they’re indeed real, and save future Christmases from disaster.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.