The recently released ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 for PlayStation sold more than 11 million combined copies, generating nearly half a billion dollars, according to industry analyst Rhys Elliott.
The games, which were developed by Iron Galaxy, were shadow-dropped on PS4 and PS5 on July 9, featuring campaign, multiplayer, and Zombies. The games were not remakes with improved graphics or new features, but instead “straight 1080p ports,” as Elliott put it.
Technical experts found that the ports feature barely any noticeable improvements at all, and that was the whole point for many. Fans wanted the OG experience, made available on modern systems.
According to Elliott, the $40 games sold so exceptionally well due to massive pent-up demand (the games are available to PS Plus subscribers for $20 until August 6). Previously, the only way to play the games on PlayStation was to find an old PS3 and go from there since they were never made available via backwards compatibility on PS4 or PS5.
“As per our estimates, Black Ops 2 sold 8.2M copies on PlayStation (93% on PS5, 7% on PS4) for about $325M, while Black Ops 1 sold 3.0M (94% via PS5) for $110M. Combined, that’s $435M on PlayStation in under a month,” Elliott said.
Microsoft and Activision are the big winners here, and so is Sony–its 30% cut works out to about $130 million “for doing basically nothing” but hosting them, Elliott said.
“Basically zero marketing or ongoing development costs are eating into that check. That single month of cataloge CoD sales on a rival platform effectively funds a massive slice of Xbox’s quarterly first-party operational overhead,” Elliott explained. “And the combined $435M is already nearly as much as Forza Horizon 6 has made via base game sales all year.”
Elliott described the move to release the Black Ops ports as a “low effort, low risk, high reward catalogue mining.” Activision also released $30 DLC bundles for both games, featuring many multiplayer maps.
He added that the success of the Black Ops ports further demonstrates that Microsoft is not going to make Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox–there is simply too much money to be made by having Call of Duty on PlayStation. Elliott went on to say that the success of the ports also demonstrates that a “proper” reboot of Black Ops “would do absolute gangbusters.”
The next new Call of Duty game is this October’s Modern Warfare 4. A multiplayer beta for the game goes live later this month.
