Last week, Amazon made an error by placing an unannounced game on its French website.

The game was Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.

Though the game was expected in the near future, there was no official announcement.

Activision, the game’s publisher, made sure that the online retail giant took down the listing within hours.

This is not new. There have been many leaks of game content through retailers.

There have been leaks of unannounced games, complete plots, and sometimes even the entire code.

What was surprising is the reaction from Activision.

The site that broke the news was the French site GameBlog. According to the site’s editor, Activision made it clear that the site would be blacklisted if the article was not taken down.

“They also made clear that the relationship was to be severed, all advertisement plans cancelled, games not sent, and invitations to later events cancelled,” GameBlog Editor Grégory Szriftgiser said in a recent interview.

Activision also contacted several other outlets.

Unfortunately, many of them, like Jeuxvideo.com and JVN.com, have taken down their respective articles on the leak.

This kind of reaction is rare, but not unheard of in the game world.

EA Games was found to selectively favor outlets that would give Battlefield 3 a good review.

Jim Render, a reprehensive of 2K games, threatened to withhold review copies of Duke Nukem Forever from media outlets that gave low scores.

Bethesda software has also threatened to pull ads from an outlet that would not give Fallout: New Vegas a perfect score.

Gaming media has a different relationship to the video game industry than traditional news outlets.

The first mediums were directly sponsored and owned by video game companies.

Nintendo Power, one of the first wide-reaching video game news outlets, is obviously owned by Nintendo.

Independent outlets only made their mark in the 2000s, and even then amateurs operated them.

Only recently did professional journalists start creating legitimate video game media outlets.

Unfortunately, all of the outlets depend on the same video game companies that they are reporting on for review copies, access to any event held by the companies, and most importantly, revenue.

The revenue generated from game ads finances almost every video game news outlet.

This gives considerable power to companies over game media.

Thankfully, instances like these are rare, but are extremely alarming when mega-publishers exercise their power.

Activision has given a statement stating that the GameBlog being blacklisted was just a misunderstanding.

But no matter how much the publisher tries to keep the incident contained, the game community knows that Black Ops 2 is under development and that Activision pressured several game sites to pull the articles.