Despite a pricing and player-experience mess, Activision's PS4 and PS5 ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 still landed in the top 10 most played US PlayStation titles last week. Circana’s Player Engagement Tracker, cited by GamesRadar+, shows Black Ops debuting at ninth place and Black Ops 2 debuting at number six. In other words, even after fans complained about the package, the install base still showed up.

The specific numbers matter because this was not a slow, niche roll-out. In the same top 10 list, Minecraft sat at eighth and Marvel Rivals at seventh, Madden NFL 26 was the only title above Black Ops in that band, and Call of Duty (the app that encompasses Warzone) appeared at fourth. That means Activision drove three different Call of Duty entries into the top 10 in the US on PlayStation in the same reporting window.

So why did these ports chart despite what the article calls a “bit of a terrible deal”? First, unless you have PlayStation Plus to use a limited-time discount, the base games are $40 each. Then you add $30 on top for the DLC map packs. That pricing structure does more than irritate individuals. It splits the community between players who do and don’t buy the map packs, and it fragments the player base further because there is no crossplay between PS4 and PS5.

On paper, that kind of fragmentation often reduces matchmaking quality, lengthens waits, and dampens engagement. In practice, it can also skew engagement toward the “ready on day one” crowd. If the most passionate users are willing to pay for the right version at the right time, ports can still spike hard enough to reach top 10 placement even while broader sentiment sours. This is the paradox decision-makers should clock: commercial traction can remain strong even when the product proposition is widely perceived as overpriced or uneven.

Then there is the second ingredient that the article flags: cheating. The ports “swiftly became rife with cheaters,” and the piece suggests this is presumably because “15-year-old exploits haven't been fixed.” Whether or not you read that as a direct root cause, the takeaway is operational. Online shooters live and die by trust in fairness. Cheaters do not just degrade fun. They can alter player behavior, push real users away, and create a reputation that follows the title into future cohorts.

But the Circana ranking suggests that, last week, nostalgia and franchise gravity still pulled players in. The article’s own context reinforces that point by showing which games kept their positions. Fortnite, NBA 2K26, and Roblox held the same top three spots as the previous week. That matters because it shows these Black Ops entries were not benefiting from a total market reshuffle. They were battling for mindshare inside a stable ecosystem of incumbents, where top-of-chart inertia is real.

If you're looking for the broader “what else is happening” signal, the article also notes last week’s big release. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag: Resynced launched within the top 30 on PlayStation. It is not top 10, but it’s another reminder that remasters and re-releases can still generate traction if they hit at the right moment. Still, the Call of Duty case is more interesting because it combines remaster-era expectations with modern live-service realities like anti-cheat pressure, DLC economics, and platform fragmentation.

For executive teams, the strategic question becomes uncomfortable: is this top 10 placement a sign that pricing and experience concessions can be absorbed, or is it the early peak before the retention cliff arrives? The article does not quantify retention beyond weekly active usage rankings, but it does lay out the risk factors plainly: $40 base price, $30 map packs, DLC-driven segmentation, no PS4-PS5 crossplay, and cheating that made the online “a bit of a miserable experience.” If you're a platform owner, publisher, or investor watching shooter engagement trends, that mix should sharpen your focus on second-order outcomes, not just launch-week visibility.