Treyarch’s Mark Lamia has said that the studio will be “supporting the hell” out of Call of Duty: Black Ops’ multiplayer post-release.

Speaking with trade publication MCV, Lamia said that games don’t need an Online Pass system, the kind implemented in Electronic Arts Sports titles, to deter second-hand sales.

“I want to take that in the other direction and bring consumers really great reasons to keep their games, rather than trade them in,” he said. “Multiplayer is critical to the success of this series. It has such tremendous staying power – there are millions of people playing Call of Duty every day.

“It’s entertaining people on a magnitude that’s mind-blowing and we work really hard to make sure it’s supported for a long time.

“The effort that goes into the multiplayer is a living thing – we have a team that continues to work on it for World At War. We’ve done that for a long time and expect to do so for this game.

“We’re going to support the hell out of Black Ops. That will be our focus post-release: making sure we keep our fans engaged, and hopefully as a result, they’ll want to keep playing our game and won’t want to trade it in.”

Lamia's comments follow from Friday's news that Call of Duty: Black Ops on PC will run only on servers operated by GameServers.com, meaning players in New Zealand will need to connect to servers hosted in Australia.