July’s top PlayStation games by copies
Halo fell a bit flat, but two 15-year-old Call of Duty ports generated almost half a billion dollars. It’s been a nostalgia-fuelled month top to bottom, though.
The top story on PlayStation this month is just how bloody well old Call of Duty can sell. Black Ops and Black Ops 2 shadow-dropped on PS4 and PS5 on 9 July, ported by Iron Galaxy with the full campaign, multiplayer, and Zombies modes intact.
Two 15-year-old Call of Duty ports went nuclear
BO1 and BO2 were ports, not remakes (BIG difference). Rather than a from-the-ground up overhaul in terms of visuals and gameplay, they’re just straight 1080p ports of the 2010 and 2012 classics.
They also cost $40 a pop ($20 for PS Plus subscribers until 6 August). Sony never made the PS3 originals backwards-compatible, so PlayStation players couldn’t go back without digging out PS3s.
That pent-up demand detonated. As per our estimates, Black Ops 2 sold 8.2M copies on PlayStation (93% on PS5, 7% on PS4) for about $325M, while Black Ops 1 sold 3.0M (94% via PS5) for $110M. Combined, that’s $435M on PlayStation in under a month.
Sony’s 30% platform cut there is roughly $130M for doing basically nothing but hosting two back-compat ports, with the rest flowing to Xbox (who owns CoD). Basically zero marketing or ongoing development costs are eating into that check.
That single month of catalogue CoD sales on a rival platform effectively funds a massive slice of Xbox’s quarterly first-party operational overhead. And the combined $435M is already nearly as much as Forza Horizon 6 has made via base game sales all year.
The timing was clever, too. Activision dropped these into a chill summer window, well ahead of Modern Warfare 4 in late October and GTA 6 in November, so the ports didn’t get buried. It’s also a nice way to build momentum for the wider CoD slate, as a low-effort, low-risk, high-reward catalogue mining.
And if two old ports can print nearly half a billion on a rival’s platform in weeks, keeping mainline Call of Duty on PlayStation is clearly essential to Microsoft’s own ARPU and MAU targets. It’s a flashing neon sign that a proper Black Ops reboot would do absolute gangbusters too, arguably outperforming the Modern Warfare reboots, given the nostalgia this port wave just exposed.
Who’s playing the Black Ops ports on PlayStation?
Us 30-to-40-year-olds who lived in the Black Ops lobbies back in the day, mostly. Looking at the top 10 for what Black Ops 2 port players also played on PlayStation in July, three clusters dominated:
Sports: 24% of PlayStation’s BO2 players also played FC 26 and 13% NBA 2K26. This is the annual-franchise crowd, players trained on yearly repurchase and comfortable spending.
Shooters and other CoD: 23% also played the Black Ops 1 port, 19% mainline Call of Duty app, and 10% Rainbow Six Siege. No surprises there. CoD players playing CoD, and the two ports feeding each other (buy one, buy the other).
Family and evergreen stuff: Fortnite, Roblox, GTA V, and Minecraft all show up in the top 10 (as you can see in the Alinea platform screenshot below) These are the mainstream, always-online mega-games nearly everyone touches.
So yeah, BO2’s port sold to the demographic you’d expect, thirty-somethings with disposable income and a soft spot for the golden age of Call of Duty, plus the broad, social, always-on PlayStation crowd.
Speaking of nostalgia and golden ages…
Black Flag Resynced smashed it on PS5
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced sold through an impressive 1.6M copies on PS5 in July. It’s worth noting that we estimate sold through (no unsold retail copies), but Ubisoft reports sold in (including unsold retail copies). This is often the case with publishers, so chill out, Twitter people.
Black Flag Resynced has since ticked up to 1.7M total on PS5 (over a quarter physical copies too), generating $109M on the platform, more than Steam and Xbox combined. As we covered at launch, this remake has been a much-needed win for Ubisoft, and PlayStation is its engine (or sail, I guess).
It was a nostalgic month all around for the Black Flag Resynced players, as 17% also played the Black Ops 2 port, and 8% played Black Ops 1’s port last month. The same crowd that grew up on 2012-era gaming reached for a 2013-era remake and 2010/2012 era ports in the same month.
This player base (now mostly aged 28 to 40ish) commands peak disposable income but increasingly limited time. So they’re far less likely to gamble $70 and 80 hours on an unproven new IP, making a $20 to $40 nostalgic comfort pick the ultimate low-friction impulse buy.
Green galore: Sports, evergreens, and… Halo round out the list
As for the rest of July’s PlayStation top sellers:
FC 26 is still riding the World Cup wave, selling 1.3M copies in July for almost $50M via base copies alone. That’s real football handled (and we won’t get too much into it again!), but American football showed up too.
College Football 27 launching to 1.1M copies ($86M), a whopping 97% of it from the US. Notably, it’s selling a touch slower than College Football 26, and about three times slower than College Football 25. Though, 25 was the series’ return after more than a decade away, so it caught a one-off wave of pent-up demand that can’t be replicated.
GTA and Minecraft, the evergreen twins keep on trucking, with GTA V moving 846K copies on PlayStation in July and Minecraft mining 501K. There’s always a fresh cohort of kiddos ageing into Minecraft, and, well, into GTA too (teens, too, of course). These two barely need a reason to sell, practically being utilities at this point.
Palworld pulled in almost 500K new PlayStation players off the back of its excellent 1.0 update. It also got about 1.3M MAUs on PS5 last month, so plenty of those early-access buyers also returned.
Halo: Campaign Evolved, the ground-up graphical remake of Halo: Combat Evolved had a notably slow start on PlayStation, which stings even more next to the success of two effort-light CoD ports. Halo sold 351K copies on PS5 in July and 452K on PlayStation to date (almost $28M). $60 was WAY too much for this one.
And for comparison, Halo has sold through 212K on Steam and around 900K on Xbox (console and PC). One can’t help wondering what could have been if Halo had kept the trajectory it had around Halo 3 and Reach. A remake of the game that started it all landing this softly on a new platform makes me pretty sad, as a Halo fan.
July’s PS5 chart, then, is clearly all about nostalgia and the catalogue. A proven, beloved old game, dropped at the right moment and, just as importantly, at the right price, can out-earn almost anything new and buy a bit of breathing room in the slate. CoD got it. Halo didn’t. Fifty dollars for what’s essentially a graphical touch-up of a 2001 game was always going to be a hard sell, and players clearly weren’t having it.
Despite this being a PlayStation chart, there’s ironically some important data and lessons for Xbox’s strategy here.
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I always appreciate your analysis, even when it greatly depresses me lol
Does 900k of Halo on Xbox includes Game Pass players?