Activision recently released ports of 2010's Call of Duty: Black Ops and 2012's Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 on PlayStation, and they were massive hits. According to a report, the games combined to sell more than 11 million copies on PS4 and PS5. Developer Gavin Goslin, who worked on these games at Treyarch, has reflected on the massive success of these ports and why it feels "bittersweet."
Posting on LinkedIn, Goslin said it's amazing to see these games continue to perform well in 2026. It's also a bit sad because the "suits" at Activision are raking in all the money, not the original developers, he said.
"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 it's 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," he said (via VGC). "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."
As Goslin mentioned here, the re-releases are not remakes or remasters--instead, they are ports with no new features or significant updates, and that's exactly what fans had been clamoring for.
People wanted the games in their original state, and that's what they got. There was significant pent-up demand, too. Before the ports, the only way to play them on PlayStation was to find an old PS3 and go from there, since they were never made available via backwards compatibility on PS4 or PS5.
Activision marketing boss Tyler Bahl told The Game Business that, "The Black Ops ports were huge successes. We thought they would do well, we didn’t think they would do that well."
Bahl went on to say pent-up demand helped make those ports so successful, and Activision is trying to take learnings from that and apply those lessons to MW4 and future Call of Duty games.
The next Call of Duty release is Modern Warfare 4, which arrives on October 23. After that, Activision has teased that a new sub-franchise is coming.