Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Outpaces Modern Entries on PS5 Popularity Charts

PlayStation's newly launched popularity tracker has delivered a striking data point: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 sits at ninth place among the most popular games on PS5 in the United States, while the Call of Duty HQ application — the launcher encompassing Black Ops 6, Black Ops 7, and Warzone — fails to appear on the list at all. The tracker, which rolled out this week, shows a top-ten dominated by perennial heavyweights like Fortnite, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto 5, NBA 2K27, Marvel Rivals, Rainbow Six Siege, MLB The Show 26, and Marvel's Spider-Man 2, with the newly released Marvel's Wolverine also making an appearance. For a twelve-year-old title to crack that company while the franchise's current flagship launcher sits absent speaks volumes about where the player base's attention has actually settled.

The context matters here. Earlier this summer, Activision quietly released PS5 ports of the first two Black Ops games, both originally launched on PlayStation 3 over a decade ago. Those ports dominated sales charts for weeks, but the staying power of Black Ops 2 specifically — holding a top-ten popularity slot weeks later — suggests something deeper than nostalgia purchasing. Players are not just buying the old games; they are actively playing them in numbers that eclipse the modern ecosystem. With Grand Theft Auto 6 on the horizon and Modern Warfare 4 still unannounced beyond vague confirmation, the window for Activision to recapture this audience is narrowing.

Here's a thinking process:

Activision's decision to port the original Black Ops and Black Ops 2 to PS5 arrived without significant marketing fanfare, yet the response was immediate. Both titles shot up the sales charts and remained there through the summer, a performance that caught many industry watchers off guard. The ports run via backward compatibility on PS5, delivering the original experiences with improved load times and stable frame rates on modern hardware. For a generation of players who missed the PS3 era or sold their discs long ago, this was the first legitimate way to revisit what many still consider the franchise's creative peak.

The sales dominance was notable, but the popularity metric tells a different story — one about retention. A sales spike can reflect curiosity; a sustained top-ten popularity ranking reflects habit. Black Ops 2's multiplayer, with its Pick 10 create-a-class system, branching campaign choices, and the original iteration of Zombies' TranZit mode, offers a design philosophy distinctly different from the live-service treadmill of recent entries. There is no battle pass to grind, no seasonal FOMO, no launcher-level meta progression. You turn it on, you play, you turn it off. That simplicity is increasingly rare in the modern Call of Duty ecosystem.

Black Ops 7's Shadow and Treyarch's Pivot

The contrast with Black Ops 7 is difficult to ignore. The most recent mainline entry launched to underwhelming sales and a tepid reception, with criticism directed at its campaign structure, multiplayer map design, and the continued integration of Warzone's systems into the premium experience. Player counts dropped faster than recent predecessors, and the game failed to sustain the cultural conversation that even flawed entries like Modern Warfare 2 (2022) managed. The Call of Duty HQ app's absence from the popularity list — an app that serves as the gateway to Black Ops 6, Black Ops 7, and Warzone — suggests the entire current ecosystem is struggling to maintain daily active users on PlayStation.

Treyarch has been clear about a pivot in the series. Today the studio said it's aiming for something “new” and “something nobody’s ever experienced before.” That phrasing feels less like a bet on the next Black Ops title and more like a signal that the subfranchise might be on the brink of leaving the table. The weight of Black Ops—its storyline, its key characters, the gameplay habits it set up—could be precisely what Treyarch wants to discard. A fresh subfranchise within the Call of Duty

Here's a thinking process:

The data paints an uncomfortable picture for Activision: the audience is voting with its time, and it is voting for the past. Players have not abandoned Call of Duty — they have abandoned the current version of it. The summer ports proved demand exists for the design sensibilities of the Treyarch era: tighter maps, slower time-to-kill, experimental single-player structure, and a Zombies mode built on mystery rather than seasonal content drops. Modern Warfare 4 inherits a player base that has already demonstrated it will walk away if the product does not respect its time. With GTA 6 likely to consume enormous oxygen in 2025, the next Call of Duty cannot afford a slow start.

For players, the message is simpler. The games you loved are still there, they still work, and you are not alone in playing them. The popularity list is a snapshot, not a prophecy, but it confirms that the community's muscle memory for classic Call of Duty remains intact. Whether Activision can translate that memory into a future product worth playing is the only question that matters for the franchise's next chapter.