ARC Raiders turns Call of Duty chat filter into free marketing

Players noticed that typing “ARC Raiders” in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7‘s in-game chat triggered censorship, sparking the controversy. Embark Studios leaned into the moment on social media, turning a thin-skinned chat filter into a light-hearted viral promotion.

During the Black Ops 7 open beta, players found that typing “Arc Raiders” in the game’s chat returned asterisks, while “Arc” and “Raiders” separately were allowed. Screenshots and videos surfaced on Reddit and X, lighting up debates. Activision stated that the block was an error that has been corrected, so the phrase now passes filtering.

Embark Studios leaned into the moment on X with an ironic post that read, “We’re still on track to release *** ******* on October 30!” and paired it with a cover art with asterisks instead of the game’s name. The post pulled strong engagement, and quote tweets from content creators added even more reach.

This wasn’t the first time ARC Raiders got slandered by a chat system. In early August, players reported that EA’s chat auto-replaced the game’s name with hashes. EA removed the block within days, and it was no longer reproducible by August 6-7.

Call of Duty has become extra conscious of rival shooters lately. Beyond the ARC Raiders slip, Activision pushed the Black Ops 7 beta one more day to October 9, which lands right before Battlefield 6 launches on October 10.

At the same time, several Call of Duty-affiliated creators have said on-stream that, during paid CoD segments, they aren’t allowed to mention Battlefield 6 by name, so they default to euphemisms like “the other game” or “can’t talk about it”.

We haven’t seen a public Activision guideline that explicitly bans competitor mentions, so for now, this sits as creator reports rather than documented policy.

Separately, Activision also made Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 free from October 9 to 16. Notably, for the first time in the CoD franchise, the main campaign is included in the free trial, alongside multiplayer and zombie mode.

ARC Raiders is a third-person PvPvE extraction shooter from Embark, releasing October 30, 2025. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is Treyarch’s military first-person shooter set for November 14, 2025. Battlefield 6 from DICE is a large-scale military first-person shooter launching on October 10, 2025. Every game will be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.