Who Gets Paid When a Blockbuster Game Is Re-Released a Decade Later?
Two games built in 2010 and 2012, reissued with new console support and almost nothing else, outsold nearly everything new on the US chart this summer. That fact alone explains why publishers keep returning to their back catalogues — and why the people who made those games are asking where the money went.
What Activision Actually Shipped
On July 9, Activision released PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 with no advance warning. The sequel topped Circana's chart as the best-selling game in the United States for July. Alinea Analytics estimated the pair sold a combined 11.2 million copies in that month, roughly $435 million in revenue. Those figures are analyst estimates rather than audited publisher numbers, but the direction is not in dispute: a pair of $40 digital re-releases, carrying no meaningful new content, performed like a major launch.
The Complaint From Inside the Original Team
A developer credited on the original games posted on LinkedIn arguing that because the ports are essentially the same code shipped more than a decade ago, the team that built them should share in the proceeds. Video Games Chronicle and GameSpot both reported the remarks. "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," the developer wrote, adding that the games were "printing money off of work completed over a decade ago."
Why Game Developers Rarely See a Second Paycheck
Most game development is work for hire. Designers, artists and engineers are salaried employees, and the publisher owns the code they produce. Music and television have built-in structures for repeat payment — mechanical and performance royalties, union-negotiated residuals. Games largely do not. A small number of senior staff negotiate profit-sharing bonuses tied to a specific title, sometimes capped or pegged to review scores, but those arrangements are usually tied to the original release. Reissuing the same build years later rarely restarts them.
That asymmetry is what makes back-catalogue publishing so attractive. A port needs no new design work, no fresh motion capture, no marketing spend of the scale a new entry demands. It sells to adults who played the game as teenagers and now own a current console. LevelUp reports that Activision has signalled it will lean further into nostalgia-driven re-releases, which suggests the model is only getting started.
What Remains Unclear
Whether any of the original Black Ops team received discretionary payments is not public. Employment contracts are private, and the developer's account is one person's view of a large production. Activision's chief marketing officer, Tyler Bahl, told The Game Business that the ports' success caught the company by surprise and said he hoped players would move on to Modern Warfare 4. The company has not publicly detailed how, or whether, members of the original teams share in revenue from the re-releases.
The wider question outlives this release. Games now have decades-long commercial lives, kept alive by digital storefronts and backwards compatibility. The contracts written when those games were made mostly assumed a disc, a launch window and a sequel. They did not assume the work would still be selling in 2026 — or that the people who made it would have moved on to other studios by then.