Arc Raiders dev has the jokes after game title is seemingly censored, and then uncensored, in Call of Duty Black Ops 7 lobby chat: "We're still on track to release *** ******* on October 30th!"

Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios has seemingly responded to reports of the words "Arc Raiders" being censored in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 lobbies.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 beta has been live for a few days now, and over the weekend, a Reddit post began circulating that seemingly showed the words "Arc Raiders" appearing only as asterisks in CoD chat lobbies. This was confirmed by our colleagues over at PC Gamer, who found that you could type "arc" and "raiders" into separate messages just fine, but when typed together they would appear censored.

Now, it's only natural to assume this was a brazen attempt by Activision to censor out the name of one of its upcoming competitors, and it's possible that's the case, but if so, why not censor, you know, Battlefield 6? Far and away Black Ops 7's most direct and formidable competition.

For its part, Activision has said (via PC Gamer) that the censorship was simply an error having to do with lobbies' text filters.

Meanwhile, Kotaku now reports that the censorship has been patched out and that you can type "Arc Raiders" into Black Ops 7 without issue. I can independently confirm that no asterisks were present when I typed the game's title in a Black Ops 7 lobby on PC.

Error or not, Embark is taking it all in stride, joking on X, "We're still on track to release *** ******* on October 30th!" There's also a promotional image of Arc Raiders attached where the game title is censored out. Good stuff.

I think I'm inclined to give Activision the benefit of the doubt here, as much as I never thought I'd say that. Again, why seemingly only Arc Raiders, an extraction shooter from a much smaller, Stockholm-based independent studio? Also, Activision had to have known that trying to censor a game title would only inevitably draw more attention to that game via social media chatter and news articles like this one. I have to believe Activision is smarter than that.

I don't know, it sounds to me like whatever text filtration software Activision is using for Black Ops 7 lobbies just had "Arc Raiders" on the bad list for whatever reason. But I'm also wildly averse to conspiratorial thinking generally. Either way, I'm glad to see the Arc Raiders devs aren't too offended.

The 5th most-wishlisted game on Steam, ex-Battlefield devs' extraction shooter Arc Raiders, was delayed 3 years because they realized it sucked: "This game is not fun"