Call of Duty Black Ops 1 and 2 ports on PS4/PS5 attract hackers again, Activision acts

The new Call of Duty Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2 ports for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 are doing the one thing game publishers want most: they are getting widely purchased. The catch is that popularity comes with a predictable downside. Eurogamer notes that the ports have attracted hackers and modded lobbies, the same problems the original versions suffered for years on their earlier platforms.

So what changed? Not the core reality that made these games attractive to bad actors in the first place, and not the incentives of the people who disrupt multiplayer. The ports are newly released, but the misconduct has not arrived late. It shows up quickly, right alongside the players who make the games busy enough to be worth hacking. In other words, the business win is real, and the security headache is real too.

From a decision-maker perspective, this is the classic “success invites sabotage” trap. Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2 ports, released for PS4 and PS5, benefit from a large audience arriving through the PlayStation Store. But multiplayer ecosystems do not scale in a neutral way. As player counts rise, the attack surface expands, and moderation becomes harder, especially when the cheating methods were already established on the games' original platforms. Eurogamer frames it plainly: these issues are not brand-new. They are “what the two games have suffered for years” before, now repeating in the ports.

There is also a market and platform incentive layer that executives cannot ignore. The ports “may cost a lot of money” and “only offer the bare minimum,” according to Eurogamer's framing, yet they still became “the most popular games across the PS Store.” That combination is strategically meaningful. It suggests publishers can generate strong commercial returns even when the product is not a full reinvention. But it also suggests risk management gets treated like an afterthought, because the revenue signal arrives fast while the long tail of abuse can linger. When the long tail hits, the operational and support burden shows up later, often after the product has already captured mindshare.

Regulators and platform policies rarely start the story, but they matter in the background. Multiplayer cheating and modded lobbies are not only a technical problem; they degrade user safety, product quality, and in some cases the integrity of competitive play. Platforms like PlayStation have expectations around user experience and enforcement. Even when no single regulator is in the headline, enforcement trends and complaint patterns can turn into platform pressure, which then turns into budget pressure inside the publisher. In practice, that means security is not only a cost center. It becomes part of how long a title stays profitable once attention peaks.

This is where Activision's response becomes the real “executive brief” part of the story. Eurogamer says Activision is “at least doing something about it.” The key word there is at least. The report positions the ports as afflicted, but it also signals that the publisher is not ignoring the problem now that the cheating is clearly visible in the PS4 and PS5 versions. For leadership teams, that matters because the response window is when trust is either preserved or destroyed. Players forgive imperfect experiences. They forgive less when they feel the publisher is slow or indifferent.

Second-order implications follow immediately. First, support and enforcement systems get stress-tested as the biggest games tend to get the most abuse. That can increase moderation workload, system costs, and the need for faster detection. Second, the “bare minimum” upgrade posture can collide with the reality that live-service expectations are now baked into player perception. Even if a port is largely unchanged, players often expect modern anti-cheat behavior and effective lobby controls, because other multiplayer titles train them to. Third, there is reputational risk. The longer modded lobbies are tolerated, the more those behaviors normalize, which makes later remediation harder.

For peers evaluating their own remasters, rereleases, and ports, the strategic takeaway is blunt: do not assume security issues stay behind when you move a multiplayer game to a new platform. Eurogamer's account ties the loop together, from popularity to predictable hacker attention to the need for action from the publisher. The stakes are straightforward: keep the games playable enough that the commercial upside remains intact, and prevent the abuse loop from turning a success story into a support-and-enforcement slog that eats margin and goodwill.