Black Ops And Black Ops 2 Confirmed For PlayStation In July As Xbox Players Stay Capped At 720p

Treyarch confirmed on June 17 that two of its most-played shooters are finally crossing back over to PlayStation. Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (2012) are getting native ports for PS4 and PS5 in July, built by Iron Galaxy Studios, the support studio behind last year’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 remaster. For PlayStation owners who have been locked out of these two games since the PS3 generation, that is a meaningful catalog gap finally closing. For Xbox and PC players, who have had both games for years already, the announcement raised a different question: when does their side of this get fixed too?

Treyarch’s announcement came through two posts on its official social media account on June 17. The first read: “It’s official: the original Black Ops and Black Ops 2 are being ported to PlayStation in July, courtesy of our partners at Iron Galaxy.” A follow-up post confirmed scope: both games will include campaign, multiplayer, and Zombies. Iron Galaxy, the studio handling the work, has built a track record on platform ports and remasters, including the recent Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 and earlier support work on titles such as Spyro Reignited Trilogy and PC versions of The Last of Us.

Treyarch was explicit that this is not a remaster. There is no indication of upgraded textures, higher resolution targets, or other visual rework, meaning the games will look and run largely as they did at original release, just on newer hardware. The studio has not said whether the PS4 and PS5 versions are separate native builds or whether PS5 players will access the game through backward compatibility with a PS4 build, and it has not announced pricing, a specific release date inside July, or whether progress and purchases from PS3 versions will carry over in any form.

The bigger gap in the announcement, for a sizeable chunk of the fanbase, is what it leaves out. Both games have technically been available on Xbox for years: Black Ops joined Xbox Backward Compatibility in May 2016, and Black Ops 2 followed in April 2017. But “available” undersells the actual condition of those versions. Multiplayer for both titles is capped at 720p with no option to push higher, despite running on hardware that handles native 4K elsewhere. Cheating has been a long-running problem across both games’ Xbox and PC populations, and neither title has been added to Xbox Game Pass, nor have their existing paid DLC packs been folded into a single purchase.

That gap fed directly into the most-quoted reaction to the news. Responding to the announcement, one fan wrote: “Microsoft and Xbox really hate their own customers. Yes a Xbox 360 version exists. But they are locked at 720p. They are full of hackers. After 2.75 years of the ABK acquisition they still aren’t even on Game Pass. The DLCs aren’t bundled in.” Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the publisher behind Call of Duty, formally closed on October 13, 2023, putting the timeframe in that quote roughly in line with the calendar.

For now, neither Activision, Treyarch, nor Iron Galaxy has detailed any parity plan for Xbox or PC versions of either game. Until the July ports land, Black Ops 2 remains reachable on modern PlayStation hardware only by streaming it through PlayStation Plus Premium, a tier separate from the standard PS Plus Game Catalog lineup most subscribers use month to month. The new ports stand on their own as a way to bring two of the franchise’s most enduring entries back to a platform that lost native access to them when the generation moved on from PS3.

The PlayStation ports land at a moment when Treyarch’s two Black Ops sequels, Black Ops 6 (October 2024) and Black Ops 7 (November 2025), have already moved the franchise’s current focus elsewhere. This year’s mainline release steps away from Black Ops entirely: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is confirmed for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2 on October 23, 2026, skipping PS4 and Xbox One. Players who digitally preorder or prepurchase any edition get early access to the campaign starting October 16. The new entry’s extraction mode, DMZ, introduces a notoriety-and-bounty system that has been compared to the wanted-level mechanic in Grand Theft Auto: killing other players raises a bounty on the killer, making them trackable and a target for other players hunting the reward. More on that mode and its launch timing is in our coverage of this season’s other live-service shifts.

For background on what else is moving through Call of Duty’s current live-service titles, see our coverage of recent platform and feature additions across the shooter space, and our rundown of competing live-service update cycles for context on how other shooters are handling cross-platform support this season.

Treyarch confirmed Black Ops and Black Ops 2 are coming to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in July, built by Iron Galaxy, with campaign, multiplayer, and Zombies included in both. The studio did not provide a release date within July, pricing, or word on Xbox and PC parity fixes. Reaction to the announcement centered on the absence of any update for the existing Xbox and PC versions, which remain capped at 720p and outside Xbox Game Pass.