Hideo Kojima Game Death Stranding Trademarked by Sony in America

Sony has Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding trademarked with everything from regular trademark classes to merchandizing, indicating a lot of faith in the game.

Sony had Hideo Kojima’s newly announced video game Death Stranding trademarked today, following company policy of trademarking numerous different games. As Sony is very involved with Kojima ever since the man behind Metal Gear arrived following his exit from Konami, the fact that they trademarked the game isn’t very surprising.

With Death Stranding trademarked, Kojima Productions is now able to fully focus on developing the game. On Sony’s end, trademarking the game allows Sony to do a lot of different things with it depending on the class of its copyrights. In Death Stranding’s case, the trademarking also allowed for a large amount of different merchandise, ranging from handbags to comic books to clothing and collectible toys.

Konami’s own store has a great deal of Metal Gear Solid-brand merchandise ranging from jackets to sunglasses to wallets, so it wouldn’t be anything new for a publisher to milk a promising IP for all that it was worth.

Considering Hideo Kojima is thought of as one of the best developers on the market presently, it’s no surprise that Sony wants to cover all of the angles.

At the same time, Sony doesn’t own every independent publisher’s trademark: Hello Games, the developers behind the soon-to-release No Man’s Sky, still owns the trademark for their own game. In contrast, The Chinese Room’s game Everyone’s Gone To The Rapture is trademarked by Sony.

Sony had Death Stranding trademarked in Europe even before E3 back in early June, and now the trademark has also come to the United States via the US Patent and Trademark Office, which handles these sorts of things.

We still have pretty much no idea of what exactly Death Stranding will be about, but if Sony has Death Stranding trademarked in so many different ways it’s likely that they have high hopes for the title when it comes out likely a few years from now.

Also, since Sony is filling the trademarks, there could be plans to make it an exclusive franchise just like God of War and Uncharted. I just hope that after this we do get to see games from Kojima that will also make way to the other platforms.

Hunter is senior news writer at SegmentNext.com. He is a long time fan of strategy, RPG, and tabletop games. When he is not playing games, he likes to write about them.