Activision Charges $40 for a 16-Year-Old Game That Runs at 1080p

Activision's new ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 to PlayStation 4 and PS5 drew scrutiny for their price, and now for their technical work. The tech team at Digital Foundry examined the port of the original 2010 Black Ops and found a native PS5 conversion running at 1080p rather than 4K, with no anti-aliasing, on a game that first shipped for PS3 and Xbox 360 sixteen years ago.

The frame rate does not compensate. The port caps at 60Hz on PS5, not the 120fps the low resolution might otherwise enable.

"A 1080p60 presentation would be potentially acceptable for the PS4 version - and there is one! - but for a brand new PS5 conversion, it's disappointingly poor and well below what the hardware is capable of."

— Digital Foundry

Digital Foundry's William Judd wrote that the lasting impression is how little time, resources, and expertise Activision put into the project. Most current games ported to PS5 default to 4K output, since the console is powerful next to a 16-year-old title. This one does not, and it keeps flaws from the original build. Shadow quality was limited in 2010 by the hardware of the day, and the port preserves those low-resolution shadow maps even though a PS5 has the horsepower to fix them.

Judd ran through the possible explanations and rejected most of them. Microsoft, which owns Activision, might not want Black Ops looking better on a PS5 than on its own Series X, but the PlayStation version still ships with a resolution advantage, so that logic does not hold. If it did, he argued, the fix would be to improve Xbox back-compat or release a proper 4K remaster on both platforms. Another theory is that whoever committed to the PS5 port had minimal resources, though the marketing behind the releases makes that hard to square. The sequel does not correct the issue: Black Ops 2 also runs at 1080p.

I think the resolution is the smaller scandal here, because a competent 1080p port would still be forgivable at the right price, and Activision priced it as if it had done far more. Each game costs $40, with a separate season pass at $29.99. Buying Black Ops 1 and 2 with all their DLC comes to $140 for games that are more than a decade old.

The Xbox side is worse in one respect. The versions playable on Xbox Series X and S and Xbox One run through backwards compatibility at the original 360 resolution of 608p, with no Xbox enhancements at all. On raw output, the PlayStation ports beat them, which is a low bar to clear.

PlayStation Plus subscribers get a steep cut. Under that discount, both games drop to $20 each and their season passes to $9, for a $58 total if a player wants everything. The offer runs until August 6, and the same pricing structure applies to Black Ops 2 and its DLC.

Judd's verdict was blunt: the original Black Ops and its sequel are celebrated entries in the series, and reasonable upgrades at a fair price with all content included, plus proper Xbox ports, should not be too much to ask. Digital Foundry framed the whole release as a deeply odd state of affairs for a somewhat high-profile port. I read the reaction as less about the numbers on a chart and more about the gap between the effort on display and the money being asked for it, since the DLC pricing means the "complete" version costs more than most new full-price releases.

Read also, Activision has confirmed Nicolas Cage will join Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 as a playable operator on June 25. The studio has not detailed everything in the crossover, though past celebrity bundles have bundled operator skins, weapon blueprints, finishing moves, calling cards, and emblems, so Cage's arrival is likely to follow the same format.