Rockstar Updates Agent Trademark... For PS4?

The seventh generation of gaming is closing. We can basically say that it's done with once November 15th gets here and the first wave of new generation titles hit. With that in mind, it's interesting to note that the game long thought to be vaporware has had an update in its trademark filing.

Tipped off once again by trusty reader Leon Lien, he points to a page on the official GTA forums where a user breaks down a couple of interesting points about a recent update regarding the trademark filing of Agent. First up, he notes that the trademark image description has changed ever-so-slightly, as noted by Siliconera a while back, with the original description reading as follows...

And here's the newly updated description, which was re-filed back on July 18th of this year....

While that's easily dismissible as a detail not worthy of noting since it's kind of old, take into further consideration that the newly filed trademark has up until the 15th of October for an opposition of publication to take place before it's finalized, which seems to hint at Take-Two Interactive possibly making a move on the trademark, or rather, prepping for an announcement.

Even if that seems far fetched for your liking, this bit might get your blood pumping just a bit more than the last few: The trademark has been updated as recent as September 10th for a publication review. That means that while Rockstar had everyone busy clamoring over Grand Theft V and all the leaked code and XML config files that came with it, they were also busy securing trademark updates and prepping to finalize logos and whatnot.

Now, this is not to say that an announcement for Agent is coming “soon” in the sense that they'll drop something out of nowhere. Given the way AAA announcements work in the video game arena, one could possibly expect Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive to drop the bomb at this year's upcoming Spike TV VGAs. I mean, at what other point could they announce the game? We're out of major trade shows and press conferences for the year.

The only thing that would seem sketchy is whether or not Rockstar will keep Agent a Playstation-brand exclusive. It's safe to say that there's no way the company will launch a new IP with the latest edition of RAGE for the crusty-old PS3, and if the game is set in an open world there's no way they would waste resources making a brand new game on their latest SDKs all the while gimping the game and cutting corners the way they had to for Grand Theft Auto V.

It would only make sense to go all out and do, creatively, what they want without all the hardware limitations by moving the project over to the PlayStation 4 and avoid the serious case of dropped frames and piss poor pop-in that the current gen consoles suffer from heavily these days.

However, there's always the possibility that Rockstar simply updated the trademark filing – something that had been lain dormant since June 2nd, 2009 – just so that they could keep the trademark in their possession. Although, trademark squatting doesn't seem like the kind of thing Rockstar likes doing without seeing something in return... à la L.A. Noire.