A former Call of Duty designer has argued that developers should receive a financial share when older games are brought to modern hardware, saying it is "hard to swallow" that Xbox is earning money from the recent PlayStation releases of Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2. Gavin Gosselin, who worked as a level designer at Treyarch, made the case in a LinkedIn post, according to IGN. He described the situation as a way for Microsoft and Activision to "print money from work done more than a decade ago."
The two titles arrived on PS5 and PS4 and performed strongly. According to estimates from Alinea Analytics cited by VGC, the pair sold roughly 11.2 million copies combined during July, generating close to $435 million in revenue in a single month.
Why it matters
The dispute touches a question that has grown louder as publishers increasingly re-release older titles on current consoles: who benefits when a game finds a second life years after its original team has moved on. Gosselin's complaint is not that the ports exist, but that the people who built the games appear to see nothing from their renewed commercial success.
His remarks also land at an awkward moment for the industry's economics. A single month of sales approaching $435 million from two games first released over a decade ago is a striking figure, and it invites comparison with the cost and risk of making new titles. If older games can outperform new releases on revenue, the incentive to revisit back catalogues only grows — and so does the argument over how those returns are divided.
Two lessons Gosselin draws from the releases
In his post, Gosselin said the recent digital releases of Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2 on PlayStation demonstrated two things. First, he argued, the current market lacks the polished, high-quality experiences players once took for granted. Second, he said, these older games remain enormously profitable for Activision and Microsoft.
That framing places the ports at the centre of a broader critique rather than treating them as a routine catalogue move. Gosselin's position is that the commercial upside is real and large, which is precisely why the absence of a payout to the original creators is difficult for him to accept.
The numbers behind the argument
The scale reported by Alinea Analytics, as relayed by VGC, gives the debate its weight. Selling about 11.2 million copies across two platforms in one month is the kind of result most new releases would envy, and it was achieved by titles that first appeared in an earlier console generation.
IGN reports that Gosselin characterised the arrangement as allowing Microsoft and Activision to profit from work completed more than ten years ago. He did not, in the remarks reported, propose a specific mechanism for sharing revenue — only that developers ought to receive a return when their games are moved to newer platforms.
The re-releases were digital-only and arrived on both PS5 and PS4, which widens the audience considerably compared with the original releases. That reach helps explain the sales figures, and it also underlines the point at the heart of Gosselin's complaint: the value being captured comes from games whose development teams have long since dispersed.
A familiar tension in a changing industry
The argument echoes long-running concerns about how back catalogues are monetised. Publishers routinely treat re-releases and remasters as low-risk products with established audiences, while the studios and individuals who made the originals typically have no claim on later sales unless a contract says otherwise.
Gosselin's intervention is notable because it comes from someone with direct experience on the series. As a former Treyarch level designer, he speaks from inside the production history of the games in question rather than as an outside commentator. His decision to raise the issue publicly, on a professional network rather than through a formal statement, suggests a personal frustration rather than an organised campaign.
For Microsoft, which owns Activision following the acquisition, the ports represent straightforward commercial success. For the developers who built the games, the reported outcome is a reminder that success in this industry does not always travel back to the people who created it.
What happens next is less clear. Neither Microsoft nor Activision has responded publicly to Gosselin's remarks in the reporting cited, and there is no indication that revenue-sharing arrangements for catalogue re-releases are under formal discussion. Watch whether other former developers add their voices — and whether the strong sales of these two ports prompt publishers to revisit more of their back catalogues on the same terms.
