Former Treyarch Developer Calls for Royalties After Black Ops PlayStation Re-Releases

A former Treyarch level designer has renewed the conversation around residual payments in the game industry after the PlayStation re-releases of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 became major commercial successes. Gavin Goslin, who worked on both games, said it is emotionally complicated to see titles built more than a decade ago continue to generate substantial revenue while many of the developers who made them receive no ongoing share of that success.

The two classic entries arrived digitally on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 as $40 releases without newly added features. Yet the response has been striking. Estimates from Alinea Analytics put their combined July sales at 11.2 million copies, producing roughly $435 million in revenue during that month. Both games also quickly appeared in Circana's U.S. weekly top 10 for active users, showing that interest went beyond collectors and nostalgia purchases.

For Goslin, the numbers are evidence that the work made by past development teams still has enormous value in the current market. They are also a reminder of a structural divide in a business where ownership, publishing rights, and the long-term revenue from a game generally sit with companies rather than the people who created its levels, systems, art, audio, and multiplayer experiences.

Legacy games, modern-sized revenue

Goslin described the renewed popularity of the two Black Ops games as bittersweet. He praised the talented teams that worked on them and recalled the intense, extended crunch periods involved in getting the games finished. In his view, seeing those titles remain relevant in 2026 is gratifying because it confirms the quality and durability of the work. At the same time, he argued that it is difficult to watch corporate owners receive the financial upside from games that former developers helped build under demanding conditions.

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His central proposal is simple in principle: when a company makes substantial new money from a legacy title through a port, re-release, remaster, or similar revival, original developers should receive some form of retroactive royalty. Goslin compared that idea to compensation structures that can exist in books, film, television, and music, where creators or performers may receive residuals tied to continuing distribution and reuse.

"Legacy revenue should mean legacy rewards for the devs who survived the crunch to build them," Goslin said.

The comments arrive at a moment when old games are becoming an increasingly important part of major publishers' strategies. Digital storefronts eliminate many of the manufacturing and retail barriers that once limited reissues. New hardware can introduce an established catalog to an audience that missed it the first time. And in a crowded market full of live-service commitments and expensive new productions, a proven game with a remembered multiplayer community can be an appealing, comparatively low-risk release.

That does not mean every older game can simply be placed on a modern platform. Licensing, server support, compatibility, content ratings, security, and account systems can all require work. Still, the Black Ops results suggest that even relatively straightforward digital releases can attract huge demand when the game itself has retained its reputation and cultural presence.

Why Black Ops and Black Ops 2 still resonate

The success of these PlayStation versions is not just a story about franchise recognition. Black Ops and Black Ops 2 occupy a particularly fond place for many Call of Duty players. Their competitive multiplayer eras, Zombies modes, maps, progression loops, and social routines are closely linked with memories of regularly playing with friends. Returning to those games is therefore not only about revisiting old mechanics; it is about trying to recreate a kind of communal gaming ritual.

Goslin argued that the releases demonstrate a wider appetite for focused, polished experiences of the kind players associated with earlier generations. The titles were sold with no major new feature set, but still moved rapidly into major engagement charts. That performance supports the idea that audiences do not always need a dramatic redesign, a large new content roadmap, or a cutting-edge technical showcase to return in large numbers. Sometimes familiarity, strong fundamentals, and easy access on a current console are enough.

For Activision and Xbox, that lesson has clear commercial implications. The publisher's chief marketing officer, Tyler Bahl, recently said the company had expected the Black Ops ports to succeed but had not anticipated just how well they would perform. He connected their popularity to players' desire to revisit the feeling of spending a relaxed Friday night gaming with friends, and said the company has begun applying lessons from the releases to both current and future projects.

Those remarks naturally invite questions about what might come next. The rebooted Modern Warfare storyline concludes with Modern Warfare 4, due October 23. With Black Ops demonstrating the appeal of a well-timed legacy return, fans may wonder whether classic Modern Warfare games could receive similar treatment before the next major Call of Duty installment. No such releases have been announced, however, and the Black Ops performance alone does not confirm any specific plans.

The difficult question of who gets paid

Goslin's argument touches on a longstanding labor issue within video games. Developers are commonly paid salaries, contract fees, bonuses, or, in rarer cases, profit participation during their employment. Unlike some adjacent entertainment industries, however, there is no universal royalty or residual system that automatically pays the people who contributed to a game whenever it is later resold, repackaged, streamed, or brought to another platform.

That distinction matters particularly for games with a long commercial life. A successful title might launch once, receive downloadable content, join a subscription catalog, return in a remastered edition, become backward compatible, or be released to an entirely new audience years later. Each path can extend the value of work done by teams whose members may have moved to other studios, left the industry, or been affected by layoffs.

Supporters of legacy royalties could argue that such payments would recognize creative contribution and make the rewards from successful catalog revivals more equitable. They could also contend that residuals would be especially meaningful for workers whose projects demanded extensive crunch, the period of prolonged overtime that Goslin referenced from his own experience.

There are substantial practical questions, too. Modern games are made by hundreds or thousands of people across internal teams and external partners. A retroactive system would need to determine eligibility, calculate payment shares, account for employees who worked only on certain phases, and establish how revenue and costs are measured. Companies would also need to decide whether payments apply only to direct ports, or to remasters, remakes, subscription access, compilations, and other forms of reuse.

None of those complications erase the underlying concern, but they help explain why a broadly adopted system has not emerged. There is currently no indication that Xbox, Activision, or Microsoft is preparing a royalty program for past developers connected to these Black Ops releases.

A changing preservation and porting landscape

The debate is also developing while the industry looks more closely at how older games are revived and preserved. In recent weeks, browser-based ports made with generative AI have surged in visibility, raising questions about ownership, quality, authorization, and the role of human developers in adapting classic software. Microsoft has acknowledged the broader explosion of AI port activity with its Xbox Labs initiative.

That environment makes the value of existing game catalogs even more visible. A classic game is not merely an old product sitting in an archive. It can be a living commercial asset, a community hub, a preservation challenge, and a point of entry for players encountering it for the first time. The Black Ops re-releases underline that the right game, released on the right platform at the right moment, can compete for attention alongside entirely new blockbusters.

It also sharpens the human side of the conversation. Players may associate a classic Call of Duty with a publisher, a platform holder, or a franchise logo, but its lasting qualities came from the work of many individual developers. Level designers such as Goslin were among the people shaping spaces, pacing, routes, encounters, and the minute-to-minute flow that audiences still remember years later.

An argument likely to continue

The tremendous PlayStation performance of Black Ops and Black Ops 2 gives Goslin's criticism unusual force because it is tied to a visible, contemporary commercial result. This is not a hypothetical concern about an obscure back catalog release. It is a dispute prompted by two games that reportedly generated hundreds of millions of dollars in a single month and rapidly regained a place in active-player rankings.

Whether that leads to any formal change is far less certain. The industry has no clear consensus on residual compensation for game creators, and there has been no public commitment to create one for this case. But the conversation is unlikely to disappear as publishers continue to mine established libraries for ports, remasters, remakes, and cross-platform releases.

For now, the Black Ops comeback has delivered two messages at once. It has shown that players remain eager to return to tightly made Call of Duty experiences from earlier eras. And it has put renewed attention on the people whose work created those experiences in the first place, as well as on whether their compensation should extend beyond the original development cycle.