An Original Black Ops Designer Wants a Cut of the New Ports

Gavin Goslin, who designed levels for both games at Treyarch, wants royalties from the $40 PS4 and PS5 versions released July 9.

Gavin Goslin designed levels for Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 back when they were new. This summer, both games came back on PlayStation and sold like they were new again, and he wants the people who built them to get paid for it.

Goslin is a veteran of Treyarch, the Playa Vista studio that made both originals for Santa Monica-based Activision. In a LinkedIn post Video Games Chronicle reported Tuesday, he wrote that 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." His fix: share the money retroactively with the developers who crunched to ship those games.

The windfall has numbers behind it. Activision shadow-dropped the PS4 and PS5 versions on July 9 at $40 apiece, or $20 for PlayStation Plus members through Aug. 6, according to Alinea Analytics. The firm estimates Black Ops 2 moved 8.2 million copies on PlayStation in under a month, worth about $325 million, while the first game sold 3 million for about $110 million.

Black Ops 2 also topped Circana's U.S. sales chart for July, VGC reported. Goslin's complaint is partly about how little changed to earn that: he called the ports basic re-releases with nothing new added.

Alinea's breakdown backs him up on that much. It says Iron Galaxy, not Treyarch, did the porting, delivering straight 1080p versions with the campaign, multiplayer and Zombies left as they were. By the firm's math, Sony's 30% store cut came to roughly $130 million, with the rest going to Microsoft, which owns Activision. The original team, by Goslin's account, got nothing.

The old games also showed up when the series needed them. Last year's Black Ops 7 ended 2025 at No. 5 in the U.S., Call of Duty's lowest finish since 2008, The Game Business reported. Research firm Ampere's figures, as cited by The Game Business, show the franchise's monthly players sliding into the mid-20 millions in 2026, then climbing back near 40 million after the ports landed.

"We thought they would do well, we didn't think they would do that well," Tyler Bahl, Activision's chief marketing officer, told The Game Business. He said the company is carrying lessons from the ports into Modern Warfare 4, out within days, and into games after it.

Goslin wants a different lesson drawn from the same sales chart. "Legacy revenue should mean legacy rewards for the devs who survived the crunch to build them," he wrote.

Source: videogameschronicle.com, retrieved October 20, 2026. Other sources: activision.com, alineaanalytics.substack.com, thegamebusiness.com.