Two 2010s Call of Duty re-releases are hits. A former Treyarch developer says the people who built them see none of it.
Old games are having a moment. According to Kotaku, Activision released Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 on PS4 and PS5 in July 2026 at $40 each, with no paid DLC and no new features. Even so, both have become among the most-played games of the year, entering the Circana US top 10 for weekly active users and expected to be among 2026's best-sellers.
A developer's reaction
Gavin Goslin spent 15 years at Treyarch as a level designer and artist and worked on both games. In a LinkedIn post that Kotaku summarises, he called the situation "bittersweet". He says he crunched heavily to finish the originals, and he finds it hard to watch executives collect large bonuses from re-releases of work he and his colleagues made. Those bonus claims are his, and the article does not independently verify them.
The structural gap
The underlying issue is not specific to one studio. Film and television writers and actors receive residual payments when their work is rebroadcast or resold, backed by union-managed funds. Game developers generally have no equivalent. Goslin's proposal is that revenue from legacy games should be shared retroactively with the people who built them, so that old work keeps rewarding its makers.
Whether or not that exact idea gains traction, the conversation is a useful reminder: when a remaster sells well, the success belongs in part to people who may have moved on, or been laid off, years ago.
Source: Kotaku
