At the beginning of December NCSoft filed a trademark application for City of Heroes. What exactly this means is anyone’s guess. Last we knew a contingent of City of Heroes players involved with the Homecoming Servers as well as others were in negotiation with NCSoft in an effort to keep the fan run servers going. The public never heard anything further about them. It is possible that this is a response to those negotiations.
It’s also possible that NCSoft is going to start working on a new City of Heroes game or even bring back the old one in an official capacity. Though on this note there isn’t a new trademark for City of Heroes 2, only City of Heroes.
But, it also has to be acknowledged that this could be a sign of NCSoft taking back control of their IP. This COULD mean that they will start going after the servers and getting them shutdown on account of trademark infringement. I’m not at all saying that this is what they are doing, it is simply one possibility while we have so little information to go on.
Whichever one of these possibilities it may be it looks like 2020 is going to be a very interesting year for City of Heroes and City of Heroes fans. I will be keeping a close eye on this story and if anything else arises I’ll be sure to write about it as soon as I hear about it.
Special thanks to MMOCulture who first spotted this story.