[UPDATE 5 October 13, 2013:. A hacker by the name of “Jason” posted images of card templates for the yet to be released League of Legends: Supremacy digital card game.]
[UPDATE 4 October 13, 2013:. Marc Merrill’s Twitter account has been breached, and information about a Supremacy card game has been leaked.]
[UPDATE 3 June 15, 2012:. The identity of Supremacy.com’s owner is no longer a secret. The Whois privacy on the name has been removed, showing the name “Riot Games, Inc.” as the registered owner. Details: LoL big announcement soon? Riot now reveals itself as owner of Supremacy.com.]
[UPDATE 2 May 27, 2012:. Riot Games filed a trademark application on May 22, 2012, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for “League of Legends: Supremacy”.Details: Riot Games makes it official, trademarks League of Legends: Supremacy.]
[UPDATE 1 May 19, 2012:. Despite all the best efforts of MarkMonitor, a company that prides itself on protecting the brands of the world’s leading companies, it failed to add Whois privacy to leagueoflegendssupremacy.org. Details: Proof that Riot Games is behind the League of Legends Supremacy domain name registrations.]
ORIGINAL STORY: Domain names can often be a good indicator of a company’s plans. And based on the large of amount of domain registrations and acquisitions recently, it looks like Riot Games is preparing to release a brand new game mode for League of Legends called Supremacy.
Back in late February, another domain blog Rogue Domaining had noted that leagueoflegendssupremacy.com and .net had been privately registered by the internet brand protection company MarkMonitor. While registering two domains may signal nothing more than a company trying to protect its intellectual property, I’ve discovered additional strong hints that Riot Games will be introducing League of Legends: Supremacy in the near future.
First off, Riot Games is a client of MarkMonitor, a firm that over half the fortune 100 rely on for brand protection online. While the key is to be discreet when registering names for yet-to-be-released games, months ahead of its Dominion game mode release, MarkMonitor registered names like leagueoflegendsdominion.com (Whois).
This week, MarkMonitor registered a slew of typos of League of Legends: Supremacy domains including:
leageoflegendssupremacy.com
leageoflegendssupremacy.net
leagueoflegendsupremacy.com
leagueoflegendsupremacy.net
leaugeoflegendssupremacy.com
leaugeoflegendssupremacy.net
lolsupramecy.com
lolsupramecy.net
lolsupremecy.com
lolsupremecy.net
lolsupremicy.com
lolsupremicy.net
Now add to that, Riot Games has apparently acquired the generic domain names Supremacy.com (Whois) and Supremacy.net (Whois), which you can most certainly assume did not go for cheap, dropping hints that League of Legends: Supremacy is definitely on its way. You don’t spend the kind of money it takes to buy generic names like these for defensive purposes unless you have a plan.
Days ago, both names transferred from their previous owner to MarkMonitor. The tie-in between Supremacy.com and the other League of Legends names, is that on the same day MarkMonitor registered the typos of leagueoflegends.com and lolsupremacy.com, it also picked up typos of supremacy.com like supramecy.net, supremecy.net, supremicy.com, and supremicy.net.
While nothing is official yet, with all these new domain registrations revealed here in the past week, news of a new game mode seems very close.
Talking about this story: League of Legends subreddit, GameZone, VG247, League of Legends Community, Neoseeker, IchSpiele.cc, OnlineWelten.com and Gameplorer.de