Ex-Treyarch Dev Says Black Ops Ports Pay 'the Suits,' Not Creators

Gavin Goslin, a level designer and artist who spent 15 years at Treyarch, says the developers behind Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops II aren't seeing any money from the ports Activision released on PS4 and PS5 in July. In a LinkedIn post, he called their success "bittersweet" and argued the revenue should be shared retroactively with the team that built them.

"It's hard to watch the suits rake in giant financial windfalls from our old code," Goslin wrote, per Kotaku. He described long crunch hours on both games and said executives collect bonuses from the re-releases while the original developers get nothing.

The ports did well by any measure. Both $40 releases, which shipped without past paid DLC or new features, went straight into Circana's US top 10 for weekly active users, and a report cited by GameSpot puts combined sales above 11 million copies. Activision marketing chief Tyler Bahl told The Game Business the ports were bigger successes than the company expected.

The details

• Games: Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) and Black Ops II (2012)
• Ports: PS4 and PS5, July 2026, $40 each, no past DLC
• Reported sales: more than 11 million copies combined
• Charts: Circana US top 10 for weekly active users
• Goslin's ask: retroactive revenue sharing for the original developers

What is Goslin asking for?

Goslin points to Hollywood, where union-managed residual systems keep paying creators when their work is resold, and notes the games industry has nothing equivalent. Developers are paid during production, and the money from a game's later lives goes to the publisher. His argument is that "legacy revenue" should come with legacy rewards for the people who built the games.

The ports' first months weren't smooth: they shadow-dropped in July amid pricing and hacking complaints, and Activision later patched an account-bricking exploit in Black Ops II. None of that hurt the numbers. Activision says it will carry lessons from the ports' pent-up demand into Modern Warfare 4, which launches today, and the new sub-series coming after it.

Sixteen years after Black Ops first shipped, its code is still earning money. The argument is over whose.