It appears video game developer Black Ops Entertainment has taken down their company website at www.BlackOps.com in favor of putting up a web page that displays a broken photo album from a church’s baseball team in San Francisco, California.
The change occurred within the last week and comes as the release date nears for Black Ops 2, the sequel to Call of Duty: Black Ops, which became the best-selling game in U.S. history.
You can look at past internet statistics to see that traffic to the popular web address (not owned by Activision) will be increasing as fans type the domain name into their browser, expecting to find more information about the video game.
In the months building up to the game’s initial launch in 2010, traffic went from nearly zero to thousands.
The reasons for the website change now all of the sudden are unknown, though theories are plentiful.
Black Ops Entertainment hasn’t developed a console game in years, the last one apparently being AND 1 Streetball in 2006, which was released on the Playstation 2 and Xbox. In recent years, it appears the company has been focused on developing apps for the iPad like iTraderPro, which has nothing to do with video games.
Is it possible the company has no more plans to develop video games and is planning to rebrand itself?
The domain name itself is a hot commodity.
Could Activision be negotiating a deal to acquire the name? The timing certainly seems right.
Or, could it be nothing more than a webmaster error? Other links on the site work such as www.blackops.com/press.html, just not the home page.
As reported here last January, Activision secretly acquired BlackOps2.com for an undisclosed amount.
I’ve reached out to Black Ops Entertainment for comment and will update this story if I hear back.
