Former Call of Duty Dev Blasts Xbox for Profiting from Black Ops PlayStation Ports: 'It's Hard to Watch'

A former Call of Duty designer has spoken out against Xbox profiting from the recently released and wildly successful Black Ops 1 and 2 ports on PlayStation, arguing that developers should receive royalties when older games are brought to new systems. Gavin Goslin, a former level designer at Treyarch, took to LinkedIn to discuss the PS5 and PS4 re-releases, stating that Microsoft and Activision were "printing money off of work completed over a decade ago."

According to estimates from Alinea Analytics (via VGC), the two games sold a combined 11.2 million copies in July, generating around $435 million in a single month. "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."

He continued: "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 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."

Goslin went on to argue that the wealth should be distributed and that developers who worked on the original games should receive royalty payments, similar to how authors, filmmakers, and musicians are compensated. "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," he said.

There is no indication that Xbox will implement a royalty payment system for video games, but Goslin's post is timely, as it comes amid a surge in AI-generated ports of classic games on browsers. Microsoft itself appears to have taken notice, announcing the Xbox Labs project in response to the explosion of AI ports that have emerged in recent weeks.

Given the success of Black Ops 1 and 2 on PlayStation this summer, Activision will be eager to double down on similar re-releases. Chief marketing officer Tyler Bahl recently told The Game Business that the publisher had learned 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?