According to a French gaming website, who initially reported the news, Amazon France reportedly listed Black Ops 2 in its video game section before pulling the listing. After reporting the news, Gameblog alleged that they were contacted by Activision to remove the article in question.
Following their refusal, Gameblog said they were disinvited from all Activision events and were told they were no longer going to receive review copies of Activision games. G4, Kotaku, Joystiq, IGN and Gamespot are all reporting on the news as well.
The following capture of the page was provided by G4, via Gameblog.
To add to the evidence supporting the rumor, Joystiq noticed that Hugo Beyer, an an artist at Nerve Software – a company that worked with Treyarch on the first Black Ops – had listed “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2” as a part of his experience on his LinkedIn. The page listed the date on the project as “October 2011 – Present”. A screenshot provided by Joystiq of the page can be seen below.
Joystiq is reporting that Meyer’s LinkedIn page has since been removed. Whether it was by his hand or someone else’s remains to be seen.
As of yet, Activision has not responded to any requests for comment by the gaming media. This post will be updated when appropriate if/when Activision responds.
What say you, gamers? Does Activision have a right to request that sites remove information regarding an unannounced project of theirs, or is this a heavy-handed move on par with the Sony-Kotaku debacle? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
