So here we are, over three months since the release of Black Ops 1 and 2 for PlayStation, and they’ve turned into one of the biggest successes of the year for Xbox. That’s absolutely amazing in one way — they’re largely untouched ports that surely didn’t have much money spent on them — but also restricting in terms of exclusivity.
Black Ops 1 and 2 already exist on Xbox in the form of the Xbox 360 versions, of course, and they’re still playable to this day via backwards compatibility. The new PlayStation ports have very minor advantages over the old Xbox releases, but not really enough for Xbox to ask players to pay for them all over again.
If they’d have put more work into properly remastering these games for a modern audience, they’d have been able to justify re-selling them on Xbox, PC and wherever else. Then again, maybe the added cost wouldn’t have been worth it?
In any case, it’s wild to see Xbox benefiting so heavily from a game (and a couple of games) that haven’t actually released on an Xbox console in 2026. The same thing might happen again with World of Warcraft: Forever in November, but it feels especially weird in the case of Call of Duty, particularly when the games are 15 years old!
