One Of Xbox’s Biggest Successes Of 2026 Didn’t Actually Release On Series X|S
By While examining the information from Circana yesterday regarding September 2026 sales in the US (particularly for the article on Xbox and Nintendo console sales experiencing YoY declines), I coincidentally spotted the compilation of “anticipated” top-selling video games of 2026 thus far, and there are two titles from Microsoft / Xbox within that roster.
The first one is Forza Horizon 6, which was reportedly the seventh best-selling title of the year up until the close of September. The second is Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which seemingly was the sixth best-seller across all consoles.
Here’s the compilation that was provided by Circana’s Mat Piscatella:
I genuinely had to ponder why Black Ops 2 would be so prominent in the rankings, and then I recalled that it had received a re-release for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 a few months back alongside the original Black Ops title.
So here we are, more than three months since the launch of Black Ops 1 and 2 for PlayStation, and they’ve become one of the most significant triumphs of the year for Xbox. That’s truly incredible in one aspect — they’re largely unaltered ports that presumably didn’t incur much expense — but it also imposes limitations regarding exclusivity.
Of course, Black Ops 1 and 2 are already available on Xbox in the form of the Xbox 360 editions, and they remain playable to this date via backwards compatibility. The new PlayStation ports offer only slight advantages over the previous Xbox versions, but not enough for Xbox to request players to purchase them again.
If they had invested more effort into adequately remastering these games for a contemporary audience, they could have rationalized reselling them on Xbox, PC, and other platforms. Then again, perhaps the additional expense wouldn’t have been justified?
In any event,
