A former Treyarch level designer who worked on Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 is publicly asking why the people who built those games aren't getting paid for their second life on PlayStation. Gavin Goslin, who worked on both titles, said the recent PS4 and PS5 ports are "printing money off of work completed over a decade ago" — and argued developers should get royalties when older games are re-released, the way authors and musicians do.
Activision hasn't said it plans to share any of that revenue.
What the ports actually are
These aren't remasters. They're basic $40 digital re-releases of a 2010 game and its 2012 sequel, with no new features and no significant updates. According to a report, the two have combined to sell more than 11 million copies on PS4 and PS5. Alinea Analytics estimates the pair moved 11.2 million copies in July alone, generating roughly $435 million in a single month.
📊 Market Data Snapshot
That's a lot of money for pressing re-upload on two old discs. The games were made by teams that have long since scattered, and none of that July haul flowed back to them.
The royalty argument
Goslin's case is straightforward: books, movies and music all pay creators when the work gets reissued. Games, he argues, should work the same way. His framing puts the dispute in labor terms rather than legal ones — no one is alleging Activision broke a contract. The complaint is that the contract never covered this.
It's a familiar gripe in an industry that has gotten very good at reselling its back catalog. What's different here is the scale. A port that costs almost nothing to produce and clears nine figures in a month is exactly the kind of product a publisher wants to keep making, and exactly the kind of product that makes the royalty question harder to wave off.
Activision's side of it
Activision marketing boss Tyler Bahl told The Game Business that "The Black Ops ports were huge successes" and credited pent-up demand. He also said the company is taking learnings from the ports and applying them to Modern Warfare 4 and future Call of Duty titles.
Read that plainly and it's a strategy statement: catalog re-releases aren't a one-off. They're a template. Modern Warfare 4 lands October 23, and Activision has already teased a new sub-franchise coming after it.
Why the crypto crowd is paying attention
There's no token here and no direct market read-through — this is a Microsoft-owned publisher and a labor dispute, not a crypto story. But it lands as a clean case study for the IP-royalty tokenization pitch that crypto gaming protocols have been making for years: the owner of the IP captures the upside, the people who made it get nothing, and on-chain royalty infrastructure is supposed to fix that.
Whether that pitch gets any capital behind it is a different question. Bitcoin dominance is elevated and speculative gaming tokens have been underperforming, so even a tidy narrative datapoint like this one has nowhere obvious to go. The structural lesson is real. The trade isn't.
For now the concrete date on the calendar is October 23, when Modern Warfare 4 arrives and Activision finds out whether the nostalgia playbook scales to a new release — and whether anyone asks again who gets paid when it does.
