"Heroes of the Storm" Apparently Approved as a Trademark

According to the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, "Heroes of the Storm" has, truly, been "formalized" as a trademark owned by Blizzard.

This puts a serious feather in the cap of those who argue that this will be the name of the next expansion. While it's not hard proof, it's strong evidence.

We've had a drought of information about Blizzard trademarks, which previously had tipped us off to both Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria's titles months before their respective announcements. Given that a company like Blizzard really does need to have this sort of duck in a row - they can't make the announcement and then register their trademark, a TM is a pretty good indicator.

Many have argued that Heroes of the Storm does not sound like a WoW expansion, and that it seems like it would be more appropriate for a new mobile game or perhaps a new name for Blizzard All-Stars, Blizzard's in-house DOTA game they've been working on for ages.

On the other hand, we had the exact same speculations when Mists of Pandaria was first uncovered. People could not believe that a serious WoW expansion would include what until that point was considered purely an April Fool's Joke.

And yet, the skeptics were wrong.

In fact, if you had asked me in 2011 which name I thought more likely to be a WoW expansion, I'd probably have said Heroes of the Storm.

The other big point in the favor of Heroes of the Storm as a WoW expansion is that we haven't seen anything else. I don't know if there's some legal way for Blizzard to make a secret trademark, and in the absence of such a thing, they need to get the name out there. It's now less than a month until the next expansion is announced, meaning that if they haven't done their legal work yet, they're really letting it get down to the wire.

And given that there must be a lot of people preparing for Blizzcon who will inevitably have to know the name of the next expansion, Blizzard has to make sure that those people can't go out and buy the website domain name ahead of time, or do some other shenanigans that would allow them to leech money out of Blizzard.

So I think we're looking at a good 75% chance that HotS is the next expansion. Beyond this, I can't really speculate. Storms could refer to Azshara's power over the ocean, or to the Titans' general affiliation with lightning. It could be any number of things.

Anyway, we're T minus 27 days here, so I look forward to discovering the truth (turns out it's Corgis Unleashed.)