Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward have announced they will be redoubling efforts to ban users with racist or hateful usernames in their games.
The statement came via the official Twitter account for Infinity Ward. For those relying on machine translation, you can find the statement below.
“There is no place for racist content in our game. This is an effort we began with launch and we need to do a better job. We’re issuing thousands of daily bans of racist and hate-oriented names. But we know we have to do more – and we are:
- Adding additional resources to monitor and ID racist content
- Adding additional in-game reporting systems to increase the number of bans by hour.
- Adding filters and greater restrictions on name changes
- Evaluating in-game improvements to make it easier to report offenses
- Increasing permanent bans to root out repeat offenders.
We apologize to our players. This is our commitment to you, our fans, thank you.”
The statement comes amid the protests and subsequent riots across the US over the death of George Floyd. This has also resulted in delays and postponements by PlayStation, EA Sports, Activision (which announced delays for several Call of Duty titles’ seasons), and IGN.
Other video game companies have also took part in Blackout Tuesday (changing their profile pictures to a solid black image, along with only posting a solid black image on social media that day), and have offered donations or organized fund-raisers.
Many other US companies and organizations have offered their support of Black Lives Matter at this time. As such, it is entirely possible the other presentations and showcases currently set for June could be cancelled.
