News continued to leak yesterday about Black Ops 2, the inevitable sequel to one of the more popular iterations of Call of Duty in recent years. We say inevitable because, well, come on. It was obviously going to happen. And the evidence is pretty straightforward: domain names have been registered, the game's been mentioned on LinkedIn, and Amazon France put up a listing for it.
But Activision apparently wants to keep the game under wraps still, and they asked several of the sites that reported those leaks yesterday to take their articles down. At least one—French site Gameblog.fr—refused, and now they've reportedly been blacklisted from all upcoming Activision events.
Kotaku's already spoken with site co-founder Grégory Szriftgiser, who had plenty to say, including, "It was important to us, as well, that we made it clear that such pressures were unacceptable, and we hope that this event will help everyone in refusing those pressures. Obviously, we regret this course of events, but we had no other choice."
Bravo. Publishers pressuring journalists to alter their coverage is a real thing, and this is exactly how it should be dealt with. It's too bad Activision has made the drastic decision to sever a professional relationship that's been maintained—according to Szriftgiser—for 15 years. Hopefully they'll reconsider that position.
Do you think they should have pulled the article? Was Activision justified in their objections? Should they be able to expect cooperation from journalists? Let us know your opinions in the comments or on Twitter.
