It's official. Square Enix loves trademarking things. News broke yesterday that the publisher had filed for a trademark on a potential Kane & Lynch sequel, and now Siliconera has discovered another application, this one for something called "Hitman Sniper Challenge."
That's on top of last month's filing for "Hitman: Profession," which was widely pegged as the title of the Hitman game in development at the company's new Montreal studio. If this latest trademark references another game (and the classifications do imply as much), it would mean that there are currently three Hitman titles in development at various Square Enix studios.
Still, I'm not entirely sure that's the case. If we're really talking about a fully fledged console release here, I'd hope that someone at Squeenix would have taken the time to come up with a better title than "Hitman Sniper Challenge." Judging on name alone, I'd bet that Sniper Challenge winds up being some kind of mobile or social game they throw out to promote Absolution.
And hey, if I'm wrong, we'll have many more terribly named Hitman games to look forward to in the future, like "Hitman: Bald Justice" and "Agent 47's Strangle Fiesta."