Earlier this week, France's Gameblog posted a screenshot of Amazon France's premature listing for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, a story that we and other gaming sites picked up immediately. We later found further support for the claim in a Treyarch employee's resume.

A new Call of Duty title -- or a second Black Ops -- wasn't particularly surprising, but apparently Activision wanted to keep the news quiet, and it called the site to take down the story, Gameblog wrote in a follow-up post. Gameblog said the reporter refused and that Activision took a strangely extreme route, "blacklisting" the site, uninviting it from events, declining to send it any more review titles and removing all advertisement.

Activision has now publicly responded to Gameblog's claim: "Activision doesn't blacklist journalists. We believe this was a misunderstanding and are working towards a resolution." That sounds like a more reasonable response than the all-out journalistic warfare Gameblog reported; then again, this is all about a Call of Duty title, so maybe "warfare" was the angle they were comfortable with at first.