Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops II re-released on 9 July

Re-releases of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops II — games from 2010 and 2012 — arrived on 9 July.

Both had been kept alive by their communities: players ran their own multiplayer servers for years after the official ones went dark. Coming back to current platforms solves an availability problem rather than a graphics one — buying and running these games legally had become noticeably harder than finding a pirated copy.

It is a quiet but increasingly common story: publishers are gradually discovering that their catalogue is an asset, not an archive.