Hey Gang, I don't want to cause a ruckus or create false rumours but today I came across some news that was odd if not troubling..
I have my Deluxe Wii U bundle pre-ordered through EB games here in Canada (GameStop) and I pre-ordered a few of the launch day games as well, including CoD: Black Ops 2 way back in September after Reggie got me all hyped up on the release dates. Today I received a call from the manager of that store informing me that Black Ops 2 was cancelled for the Wii U and that they would have to refund my pre-order. I clarified that it wasn't just a case of them not having enough copies to fulfill my pre-order on launch, it was that the game literally was not going to be available and that the district managers from corp are instructing all stores to refund everyone's pre-orders for the game and that he didn't have any other details on the matter.

NOW, this seemed very odd to me because the game promises to be a huge seller and it's one of the flagship "core" gamer titles pushing the Wii U at launch so it's not something that would be done on a whim. Also, this may be an issue specific to the Canadian market only, it may just be a supply thing to Canada. I checked on both the Canadian and American sites as well as Amazon and they still have it listed available for pre-order and pick-up..

Then I got to thinking, there's been a bunch of huffing and puffing over the online multiplayer functionality of this title on the Wii U, the potentially awkward voice chat in-game, and the lack of the Elite package thing so maybe there is some merit to this (hopefully temporary) cancellation and the game is just being pushed back so they can have more development time to iron out these wrinkles?

My question to the rest of the community is this: has anyone else heard anything similar from their local GameStop/EB Games? If you don't believe me just ask your local suppliers and see what they say. Maybe one of the NL contacts has more concrete info on this to confirm or deny it (it may well just be some misinformed gamestop manager here in Canada).

Well, I certainly can't find any links/stories.

Yeah neither can I, all I know is that they called to cancel the pre-orders for the game (usually GameStop does whatever they can to get money out of us - not give it back) so I'm hoping it's just GameStop staff being misinformed (surprise).

I'm sure they'd have put something out by now, besides just calling.
This may sound crazy to you, but call your GameStop to make sure. My friends and I do things like that to one another all the time. At the very least, double and triple check.

Yeah, I double and triple checked with this GameStop where my pre-orders are and they insisted they were specifically instructed not to fulfill any pre-orders for the game because they were told the game was no longer going to be available for the Wii U (despite about a million stories and promotional hype spent by Activision online and at the frigging preview event with Reggie and Activision reps demonstrating it that suggest very strongly otherwise).

So I called a bunch of other locations and suppliers and none of them have heard anything of the sort.

So let's close this thread and chalk it up to GameStop employees not bothering to give a toss.

Apologies for any alarms or surprises.

I would imagine that they got the preorder date wrong and don't want to own up to it. Since Black Ops 2 comes out about a week before the Wii U launches.

I work in a Canadian game store and it appears to not be cancelled nor has the release date changed. Also you should never trust gamestop.

I used to pre-order games at Gamestop a lot. Now I just do it online at places like Newegg, Best Buy, Etc.

I really think the separate screen local multiplayer in Black Ops 2 is the best idea. I love the idea since my bro always look at my screen in split screen games to find my location.

Well, maybe they had the reservation down on the wrong system? Not the Wii U, but another Nintendo system the series has released on before? That was confirmed this last week, but it's apparently not news worthy.