Sleeping Dogs took a strange trip before it hit retail shelves and digital download services. It started out as another entry in the True Crime series before Activision cancelled it in 2011. Then, Square Enix picked it up and re-branded it as a new game with developer United Front Games. Sleeping Dogs released in August 2012 with overall positive reviews , and now United Front Games is teasing a successor.

Today, the developer announced that it is working on "another game based in the Sleeping Dogs universe" and referenced a trademark registration dubbed Triad Wars—players will recall that Sleeping Dogs starred an undercover cop named Wei Shen who infiltrated the Hong Kong Triads.

This comes after the consistently bad news that publisher Square Enix has dripped out over the course of 2013. The publisher partially blamed Sleeping Dogs for its poor financial year, despite it selling near two million units and Tomb Raider and Hitman: Absolution selling over 3.5 million units. All three of those games also enjoyed varying levels of critical success and were no doubt expensive as hell.

The trademark page mentions mobile phones, but it's likely that Square Enix is just preventing infringement across all platforms. After all, Sleeping Dogs was a technical behemoth on PC . We won't know until 2014 since United Front has pledged no new info until then. Maybe it is a full-fledged sequel. Or maybe it's a MOBA. Either way, it could sell 4 million copies and Square Enix might still call it a failure.