Gaming executives making millions off decade-old code while the developers who sacrificed their health to write it walk away with nothing isn’t a new story, but every time the curtain gets pulled back, it’s just as infuriating.
Earlier this week, Gavin Goslin—a 15-year Treyarch veteran who worked as a level artist and designer across the franchise’s golden era—took to LinkedIn to call out Activision and Microsoft over the runaway commercial success of the Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2 re-releases.
His message was blunt: publisher suits are cashing massive checks off the backs of burned-out developers who aren’t seeing a single dime.
“Cruel Nights of Crunch” vs. Nine-Figure Paydays
For those who lived through the golden age of Call of Duty, Black Ops (2010) and Black Ops 2 (2012) are legendary milestones. But behind those iconic campaigns and multiplayer maps were grueling, round-the-clock development cycles.
Reflecting on seeing both titles dominating sales charts again in 2026, Goslin described a deeply conflicted reaction:
“I poured my heart and soul into these games alongside a brilliant team, surviving brutal crunches and countless nights fighting for perfection. Seeing titles we bled for top the charts again in 2026 is rewarding on one hand—but watching executives pull in massive profits off our legacy work while the actual developers get nothing is an incredibly bitter pill to swallow.”
Goslin didn’t stop there. As his comments gained traction across the industry, he doubled down on the structural disparity plaguing game development:
“Watching leadership extract immense wealth from our old code while talented developers face layoffs and receive zero residuals highlights a fundamental flaw in how our industry values talent. If legacy games are going to print money for publishers in 2026, the people who survived the trenches to build them deserve real compensation and security.”
The Absurd Numbers Behind “Minimal Effort” Ports
What makes Goslin’s frustration so understandable is just how lucrative these re-releases have been relative to the effort put into them.
According to Circana tracking data, since dropping in July, the re-releases of Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2 have moved a staggering 11 million copies, raking in nearly $450 million. They didn’t just top the July revenue charts; they currently sit as the fifth highest-earning gaming release of the entire year.
Yet, as breakdowns from outlets like Digital Foundry made painfully clear, these weren’t full remakes or even ambitious remasters—they were essentially barebones re-releases running on modern hardware with modest tweaks. Pure margin, almost zero modern development overhead, and an absolute windfall for Activision and Microsoft.
The Blogger’s Take: Where Are the Residuals?
In film and television, actors, writers, and key creatives receive residuals when a network syndicates their show or a streaming platform licenses their film decades later. In gaming? Once your milestone bonus clears—if you were lucky enough to receive one—you’re completely disconnected from the financial life of your work.
You can spend two years destroying your physical and mental health crunching to ship a genre-defining classic, get laid off a decade later during an industry downturn, and then watch your former employer pull half a billion dollars off your work without so much as a thank-you note.
Meanwhile, the franchise machine rolls on without missing a beat. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 drops this Friday, October 23, with early-access campaign praise already priming the pump for another record-breaking launch. But as we gear up to dive into the next cycle of hype, Goslin’s comments serve as a necessary reality check: nostalgia is an insanely profitable commodity in gaming, but the people who actually crafted the memories rarely share in the bounty.