Activision recently confirmed that a new Call of Duty title would be released this year, as expected, but the publisher didn’t provide any details as to what exactly it would be. Thanks to a retailer listing and an employee’s resume, we may now know.
Earlier today, French website Gameblog.fr reported that Amazon briefly added a listing for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 on their website, but the online retail giant promptly removed the listing.
Things got quite a bit more interesting when Gameblog updated its story, claiming that Activision France had demanded that the news be taken down. Gameblog didn’t comply and Activision allegedly “blacklisted” them, which saw the site “uninvited from an upcoming Transformers: Fall of Cybertron preview event and planned advertising was pulled,” according to Game Informer’s report.
Shortly after that ordeal, Joystiq spotted another mention of Black Ops 2 from the LinkedIn profile of a Nerve Software employee, a company that frequently does contract work for the publisher. Once that new tidbit broke, the employee’s LinkedIn profile was taken down–undoubtedly at the behest of Activision.
Considering that Black Ops was Treyarch’s most commercially successful Call of Duty title to date, I’d be surprised if this didn’t turn out to be true–especially considering the fact that Activision nabbed a bunch of Black Ops sequel domains last year.