While Activision thought porting Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 to PS4 and PS5 would be a good move, even the developer's highest brass didn't expect it to work as well as it did. As such, the success is being studied and, hopefully, brought to modern CoD entries.
"We are definitely leaning into the nostalgia of playing with your friends," chief marketing officer Tyler Bahl tells The Game Business. "The Black Ops ports were huge successes. We thought they would do well; we didn’t think they would do that well.
"But you can see that pent-up demand of being able to get back to the good old days of playing with your friends on a Friday night and having fun. Modern Warfare 4 does that. We took a lot of learnings from [those ports] and are starting to apply them to not only this game, but future games."
The trend of shadow dropping games aside, the buzz around the Black Ops 1 and 2 ports was positive earlier this year. According to analysts, they were regular chart toppers and even provided lessons to other remakes and remasters, like Halo.
While Activision hasn't released the numbers, around the same time, the developers shifted Black Ops 7's matchmaking to more closely resemble that of its successful predecessors.
Moving forward, it seems to be all in the spirit of change the Call of Duty series needs, with sales steadily dipping over the years to the point that the latest Battlefield reigned supreme as the best-selling shooter of 2026, something the developers of CoD haven't had to face for a long ol' time.
"Where we go with future games, we have to innovate," Bahl says. "What we heard from the audience is they want new or better or different. The landscape is changing right under our feet.
"You’re seeing new games being built overnight, and you’re seeing tastes change and how people want to play."
