A former Call of Duty designer has argued that developers should get royalties when older games are ported to new systems, saying it's "hard to watch" Xbox make money from the recently released and hugely successful Black Ops 1 and 2 ports on PlayStation.
Former Treyarch level designer Gavin Goslin took to LinkedIn to discuss the PS5 and PS4 re-releases, which he said amounted to Microsoft and Activision "printing money off of work completed over a decade ago."
The pair of games reportedly sold 11.2 million copies combined in July, earning around $435 million in one month, according to estimates from Alinea Analytics (thanks, VGC). “The recent Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2 digital drops on PlayStation proved a couple of things,” Goslin said. “First, today’s gaming landscape is starved for the tight, high-quality experiences we used to get. Second, these legacy titles are still massive money-makers for Activision and Microsoft.
“Despite being basic $40 digital re-releases with zero new features, both titles immediately shot into the Circana U.S. Top 10 for weekly active users. They are printing money off of work completed over a decade ago.
“As a developer who actually worked on both Black Ops and Black Ops 2, seeing these charts is bittersweet. I poured my life into those games, spending countless, brutal hours in crunch alongside an incredibly talented team to make sure they were perfect.
“Seeing our blood, sweat, and tears still dominating the charts in 2026 is amazing, but its (sic) hard to watch the suits rake in giant financial windfalls from our old code while the actual creators don’t see a dime of it.”
Goslin went on to argue that the wealth should be distributed and developers who worked on the original games should get royalty payments, like in books, movies, and music. “If executives are getting massive bonuses off the longevity of these classics, that wealth needs to be shared retroactively. Legacy revenue should mean legacy rewards for the devs who survived the crunch to build them,” Goslin said.
There is no indication that Xbox will create a royalty payment system video games, but Goslin's post is well-timed, as it comes amid a surge in AI-generated ports of classic games on browsers. Indeed, Microsoft itself has appeared to take notice, announcing the Xbox Labs project in acknowledgement of the explosion in AI ports that have emerged in recent weeks.
Given the success of Black Ops 1 and 2 on PlayStation this summer, Activision will be keen to double down on similar re-releases. Chief marketing officer Tyler Bahl recently told The Game Business that the publisher had learnt a valuable lesson.
"We are definitely leaning into the nostalgia of playing with your friends,” Bahl said. “The Black Ops ports were huge successes. We thought they would do well, we didn’t think they would do that well. But you can see that pent-up demand of being able to get back to the good old days of playing with your friends on a Friday night and having fun. MW4 does that.
"We took a lot of learnings from [those ports] and are starting to apply them to not only this game, but future games."
In the shorter term, Modern Warfare 4, which closes out the rebooted Modern Warfare saga, comes out October 23. Will Activision release ports of the classic Modern Warfare games next summer, ahead of the next mainline entry in the franchise?