Former Treyarch Dev Calls Out Royalty Gap After Black Ops Ports Generate Millions

Digital re-releases of 2010's Call of Duty: Black Ops and 2012's Call of Duty: Black Ops II generated hundreds of millions of dollars within weeks of their July 9, 2026 debut on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, prompting a veteran designer to question why original development teams receive no residual income. Gavin Goslin, a level designer and artist who spent more than 15 years at Treyarch, criticized the absence of royalties for developers whose past work continues to drive major commercial returns.

While media outlets frequently described the titles as remasters, technical analyses confirmed they are direct, unenhanced 1080p ports. Support studio Iron Galaxy handled the porting work rather than Treyarch. The releases launched on the PlayStation Store at $40 each, alongside a temporary $20 promotional discount for PlayStation Plus subscribers, without bundled DLC or updated gameplay systems. Market research firm Alinea Analytics estimated that the two games sold a combined 11.2 million digital copies on PlayStation in July 2026, totaling roughly $435 million in gross sales.

Estimated Sales and Distribution Revenue

According to Alinea Analytics, Black Ops II accounted for 8.2 million units and $325 million in sales, while the original Black Ops generated $110 million across 3 million copies. Sony took an estimated 30 percent store cut, representing about $130 million, with the remaining net proceeds flowing to Microsoft and Activision.

Sales tracking from Circana placed Black Ops II at the top of the U.S. video game sales chart for July 2026, with both titles ranking in the U.S. top 10 for weekly active users throughout the month. Activision marketing executive Tyler Bahl acknowledged the commercial surge to The Game Business, saying, "The Black Ops ports were huge successes. We thought they would do well, we didn't think they would do that well."

Developer Frustration Over Missing Residuals

Goslin addressed the revenue figures in a public post on LinkedIn, expressing dismay over how profits from older catalog titles are distributed. "Seeing our blood, sweat, and tears still dominating the charts in 2026 is amazing, but its 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 wrote.

He argued that when corporate leaders receive performance incentives tied to catalog sales, the staff responsible for developing the original games should participate in those gains. "Legacy revenue should mean legacy rewards for the devs who survived the crunch to build them," Goslin stated, adding that profiting off older code while technical talent contends with industry job cuts highlights structural inequities in studio compensation.

Publishers Maintain Silence on Royalty Structures

Neither Microsoft, Activision, nor Sony has released official financial totals for the ports or commented on requests for legacy royalty models. The commercial scale of the re-releases demonstrates the profitability of repackaging legacy software on modern hardware, yet without negotiated residual agreements across major publishers, the developers who built the original code remain cut off from the long-tail earnings of their work.