When going through the data from Circana yesterday for September 2026 sales in the US (specifically for the story about Xbox and Nintendo console sales suffering YoY decreases), I happened to notice the list of "projected" best-selling video games of 2026 up to that point, and there are two games from Microsoft / Xbox in that lineup.

The first of these is Forza Horizon 6, which supposedly was the seventh best-selling game of the year up to the end of September. The other one is Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which apparently was the sixth best-seller across all platforms.

Here's the list that was shared by Circana's Mat Piscatella:

I honestly had to rack my brain about why Black Ops 2 would be trending so high in the list, and then remembered that it got a re-release for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 a few months ago along with the first Black Ops game.

So here we are, over three months since the release of Black Ops 1 and 2 for PlayStation, and they've turned into one of the biggest successes of the year for Xbox. That's absolutely amazing in one way — they're largely untouched ports that surely didn't have much money spent on them — but also restricting in terms of exclusivity.

Black Ops 1 and 2 already exist on Xbox in the form of the Xbox 360 versions, of course, and they're still playable to this day via backwards compatibility. The new PlayStation ports have very minor advantages over the old Xbox releases, but not really enough for Xbox to ask players to pay for them all over again.

If they'd have put more work into properly remastering these games for a modern audience, they'd have been able to justify re-selling them on Xbox, PC and wherever else. Then again, maybe the added cost wouldn't have been worth it?

In any case, it's wild to see Xbox benefiting so heavily from a game (and a couple of games) that haven't actually released on an Xbox console in 2026. The same thing might happen again with World of Warcraft: Forever in November, but it feels especially weird in the case of Call of Duty, particularly when the games are 15 years old!

Should Xbox Bring These Black Ops Ports To Series X & S?

What do you think about this? Should Xbox re-release Black Ops 1 and 2 on their own consoles? Tell us below.