Neowiz just handed Lies of P fans their first real clue about what comes next, and it didn’t come from a trailer or a showcase slot. It came from a European trademark database. On September 10, 2026, the South Korean publisher filed an application with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) for the word mark “Wonders of O.” Within hours, outlets including Nintendo Wire, Vice, Beebom, Exputer, Twisted Voxel and Notebookcheck had connected the dots to Round8 Studio’s long-teased Lies of P sequel. Neowiz has not confirmed that link. But the timing, the filing categories and two years of breadcrumbs from the studio make the theory hard to dismiss.
This is a story about a trademark, not a trailer, so the facts are narrower than the headlines suggest. Here’s what’s actually in the filing, what Neowiz and Round8 have said on the record, and why “Wonders of O” is quickly becoming the most-discussed unannounced game in the soulslike genre.
What Neowiz Actually Filed With the EU Trademark Office
The EUIPO listing names Neowiz as the applicant for “Wonders of O,” filed on September 10, 2026, according to reporting from Vice and Beebom. Nintendo Wire, which broke the story for English-language readers, cites a September 9 filing date in its own reporting, a one-day discrepancy with the EUIPO record that hasn’t been resolved by either outlet. Either way, the paperwork is barely days old as of this writing.
The application is registered as a word mark, meaning it protects the title text itself rather than a logo or stylized design. Per the EUIPO’s public classification data, the goods and services listed include “virtual reality game software,” “interactive multimedia software for playing games,” and software “for use in providing multiple user access to a global computer information network.” A broader description covers computer game software downloadable from both wireless devices and the open web. None of that is unusual phrasing. It’s the same boilerplate publishers use to blanket-cover a new title before anyone outside the studio knows what it is.
What makes this filing notable isn’t the legal language. It’s who filed it, and when.
Why Fans Immediately Connected It to Lies of P
Neowiz publishes exactly one franchise with the scale to justify a fresh trademark this close to a major showcase season: Lies of P, the Pinocchio-inspired soulslike developed by its subsidiary Round8 Studio. Exputer’s report frames “Wonders of O” as likely tied to that series, and Twisted Voxel’s headline states the connection even more directly. The reasoning isn’t just vibes. Neowiz has spent the better part of two years signaling that a sequel is already in motion, and the new title fits a pattern the original game set up on purpose.
The Wizard of Oz Clue Hiding in the Ending
Lies of P closes with a direct reference to Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, a detail genre fans have picked apart since the game launched in 2023. Notebookcheck’s coverage argues the “Wonders of O” filing “validates a popular theory” that the follow-up will lean into Oz-inspired territory the way the first game leaned into Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. Vice’s reporting reaches a similar conclusion, floating “The Wonders of O” as a title that would “continue the series with a story inspired by Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz.” Neither outlet claims Neowiz has confirmed the theme. Both treat it as the most logical reading of a title that rhymes suspiciously well with a famous literary reference the studio already planted.
Beebom is more careful about the leap from trademark to confirmed sequel, noting that the thematic overlap makes “the connection more interesting” without settling whether “Wonders of O” is a direct sequel title, a spinoff, or something else entirely. That caveat matters. A trademark filing is a legal reservation, not a marketing announcement.
Lies of P’s Road From Release to 4 Million Copies
To understand why Neowiz would bother protecting a new title now, it helps to look at what the original game actually did for the company. Round8 Studio shipped Lies of P in September 2023, and the game found an audience well beyond South Korea. By June 2025, Neowiz and Round8 announced the game had crossed 3 million copies sold, with more than 90% of that total coming from outside its home market. Management rewarded the development team with roughly $7,300 per developer, a Nintendo Switch 2 console, and two extra weeks of vacation, a bonus structure the publisher tied directly to the sales milestone.
Growth didn’t stop there. By March 19, 2026, combined sales of the base game and its standalone expansion, Lies of P: Overture, had reached 4 million copies. That’s a 33% jump in roughly nine months, driven in large part by the expansion’s own critical reception rather than just holdover interest in the original release.
Overture’s Awards Haul Raised the Stakes
Lies of P: Overture didn’t just sell. It collected hardware from multiple award circuits, picking up Best Downloadable Content at the 15th New York Game Awards and Best Game Expansion at the Golden Joystick Awards. The expansion also received recognition from the Lenovo 3DJuegos Awards and the Flow Games Awards, plus an Excellence and Technical Creativity Award from the Korea Game Awards. For a mid-sized Korean publisher competing against FromSoftware-scale marketing budgets, that’s an unusually deep trophy case for a single add-on.
Those wins matter for the sequel conversation because they raise the bar Round8 has to clear. A studio coming off a Golden Joystick win for downloadable content isn’t likely to follow it up with a modest patch or a rushed cash-in. Whatever “Wonders of O” turns out to be, it’s arriving with expectations the original Lies of P never had to carry.
What Neowiz and Round8 Studio Have Said About a Sequel
The sequel itself is not a rumor. Neowiz and Round8 confirmed a follow-up was in development back in mid-2025, around the same window as the 3-million-copy announcement, though the studio gave no release window at the time. Reporting from gagadget adds that the project had moved from early development into full production by May 2026, months before the trademark surfaced.
The clearest on-record comments come from Lies of P director Choi Ji-won, who appeared in a teaser attached to a feature published by Nintendo Life on August 7, 2026. Introducing himself directly to fans, Choi Ji-won said: “I’m Choi Ji-won, director of Lies of P and our next game.” He followed with a direct message to the fanbase: “You won’t be disappointed, we promise.” He closed the tease with a line that plays on the original game’s central theme of dishonesty and deception: “This is the truth, not a lie.”
Those three lines are the closest thing to an official statement on the sequel’s existence that Neowiz has put on the record. Choi Ji-won never mentions a title, a setting, or a release window. The trademark filing fills in a gap his teaser deliberately left open.
Lies of P Franchise Timeline: Sales, Awards and the Trademark
| Date | Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|
| September 2023 | Lies of P launches, developed by Round8 Studio, published by Neowiz | Neowiz / Round8 Studio |
| June 2025 | Base game crosses 3 million copies sold; over 90% of sales outside South Korea; developers rewarded with ~$7,300 each, a Switch 2, and two weeks off | Neowiz / Round8 Studio |
| Mid-2025 | Neowiz confirms a Lies of P sequel is in development; no release date given | Neowiz |
| May 2026 | Sequel reported to have entered full production | gagadget |
| March 19, 2026 | Combined Lies of P + Overture sales reach 4 million copies | Neowiz / Round8 Studio |
| August 7, 2026 | Director Choi Ji-won teases the sequel on camera, gives no title | Nintendo Life |
| September 10, 2026 | Neowiz files EUIPO trademark for “Wonders of O” | Vice / Beebom / EUIPO |
Trademark Filings Have Become Gaming’s Unofficial Announcement Channel
Neowiz’s filing isn’t happening in a vacuum. Reading public trademark databases for hints about unannounced games has turned into a standing beat for gaming outlets, and 2026 has already produced two comparable cases. Trademark offices publish new filings on a rolling basis, and because publishers rarely explain why they’ve registered a new title, journalists and fans fill the silence with informed guesswork.
Sony’s “Break In” and Saber’s “Bug Busters”
Sony Interactive Entertainment filed a USPTO trademark for “Break In” on May 20, 2026, timed closely enough to a June 2 State of Play showcase that outlets speculated about a connection to the publisher’s other rumored projects. shattered.io covered the wider fallout from that same speculation cycle around Sony’s Fairgame$ leak, which itself surfaced under a separate code name months earlier. Saber Interactive followed with two USPTO filings for “Bug Busters” on June 4, 2026, registered under classes 009 and 042, which reporting from ThePhraseMaker described as evidence that “strongly point towards an unannounced live-service game.”
Neither of those filings has resulted in an official reveal as of this writing. That’s the pattern worth remembering before treating “Wonders of O” as a done deal: trademark speculation has a real hit rate, but it also has a real miss rate, and publishers face no legal obligation to ever explain a filing.
2026 Trademark Signals: How Wonders of O Compares
| Filing | Publisher | Office / Date | Speculated Project |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wonders of O | Neowiz | EUIPO, September 10, 2026 | Lies of P sequel (unconfirmed) |
| Break In | Sony Interactive Entertainment | USPTO, May 20, 2026 | Unconfirmed, tied to State of Play timing |
| Bug Busters | Saber Interactive | USPTO, June 4, 2026 (two filings) | Unannounced live-service game (unconfirmed) |
What’s Still Unconfirmed, and Why That Matters
It’s worth separating what’s documented from what’s inferred here, because the two keep getting blended in social media chatter. Confirmed: Neowiz filed a EUIPO word mark for “Wonders of O” on or around September 10, 2026. Confirmed: Round8 Studio is building a Lies of P sequel that reached full production by May 2026. Confirmed: director Choi Ji-won has publicly acknowledged the project exists, without naming it.
Unconfirmed: that “Wonders of O” is the sequel’s title rather than a spinoff, a mobile tie-in, a VR experiment, or an entirely unrelated project. The filing’s own classification language leans toward general game software, which covers almost anything Neowiz might release next. Unconfirmed: any Wizard of Oz plot connection beyond the thematic echo fans have drawn from the first game’s ending. Unconfirmed: a release window, platforms, or pricing of any kind. No outlet in this story’s sourcing, including Nintendo Wire, Vice, Beebom, Exputer, Twisted Voxel or Notebookcheck, reports that Neowiz has issued a statement tying the trademark to the sequel by name.
That gap between “extremely likely” and “officially confirmed” is exactly where trademark journalism tends to live, and it’s worth keeping in mind before treating headlines as an announcement. The same caution applied to another recent trademark-adjacent leak, when a Steam achievements database leak surfaced details on unannounced titles that publishers hadn’t cleared for release.
Market and Studio Impact if Wonders of O Is Real
Neowiz hasn’t disclosed financial guidance, a development budget, or projected sales tied to any sequel, trademarked or otherwise. The only hard financial signal tied to the franchise’s performance remains the developer bonus program disclosed after the 3-million-copy milestone, which the publisher explicitly linked to Lies of P’s outperformance. That’s a meaningful data point on its own. A publisher doesn’t hand every developer on a project roughly $7,300 in cash plus hardware and paid time off unless the title materially moved its business.
The bigger impact, if “Wonders of O” is confirmed as the sequel, is reputational rather than immediately financial. Lies of P proved a mid-sized Korean publisher could compete in a genre long dominated by FromSoftware without a AAA marketing budget, largely on the strength of word-of-mouth and a strong 90%-plus export rate. A sequel that builds on 4 million combined sales and a Golden Joystick win for its expansion would give Neowiz a second data point that the studio’s soulslike formula travels, not a one-off success. That’s the kind of track record that shapes how publishers pitch their next original IP to platform holders and investors, even without a single disclosed dollar figure attached to this specific filing.
How Wonders of O Fits the Soulslike Genre’s Bigger Picture
Lies of P arrived in 2023 as part of a broader wave of soulslike action RPGs built by studios outside FromSoftware, a genre that had spent most of the previous decade being treated as too niche or too difficult for non-Japanese developers to crack. Its commercial performance, on top of Overture’s award run, gave Korean publishers a concrete example that the format could travel well beyond its origin studio’s home turf, a lesson other single-player releases like Blood of Dawnwalker and Onimusha: Way of the Sword have echoed with their own fast climbs past the 1-million-copy mark this year. Broader coverage of the current gaming news cycle shows a similar pattern: publishers leaning harder on proven single-player IP rather than chasing new live-service bets. Neowiz’s willingness to keep investing, first with a full standalone expansion and now with what looks like a numbered follow-up, suggests the publisher sees the genre as a long-term pillar rather than a lucky one-off.
That context also explains why gaming outlets jumped on a routine trademark filing so quickly. A sequel to a genre-defining hit is inherently more newsworthy than a filing from a studio without that track record. The same scrutiny that surrounded Sony’s Break In and Saber’s Bug Busters trademarks gets amplified here because Lies of P already has box-office proof behind it.
Neowiz’s Bet Against Bigger Publishers
Round8 Studio remains a comparatively small team next to the first-party studios backing competing action RPGs. That makes the scale of Overture’s awards run, and the reported jump from early development to full production by May 2026, more notable rather than less. A publisher that size doesn’t typically get to make a sequel decision lightly, since a underperforming follow-up carries more relative risk than it would for a larger studio with a deeper release slate to fall back on. Filing a trademark two years after the original launch, rather than rushing a reveal, reads as a publisher protecting a name it plans to use carefully rather than one racing to cash in on hype before the game is ready to show.
Predictions: What Happens Next
- An official reveal is more likely at a major fall or winter showcase than through a standalone announcement. Publishers rarely burn a trademark leak’s momentum without pairing the eventual reveal with a trailer slot, similar to how Sony’s Break In filing lined up with a State of Play window.
- Expect Neowiz to stay quiet on specifics for weeks, not days. The pattern from Choi Ji-won’s August tease, offering confirmation without detail, suggests a studio comfortable letting speculation build rather than rushing to correct it.
- If “Wonders of O” is the real title, expect explicit Wizard of Oz marketing to follow fast. The thematic tie-in is too clean, and too widely already reported by outlets like Notebookcheck and Vice, for Neowiz to walk back even if it wanted to.
- Watch for additional trademark filings in other territories. A EUIPO-only filing is unusual for a title Neowiz intends to sell globally. Matching USPTO or Korean IP office filings would be the next confirming signal to watch for.
- Round8 Studio’s next public statement will likely address scope, not story. Given the studio is coming off a smaller team completing a AAA-quality expansion, expect early comments to focus on production scale and timeline rather than plot details, mirroring how the studio handled Overture’s own lead-up.
How This Compares to Past Lies of P Reveals
Neowiz has now used three distinct disclosure methods across the franchise’s life: a full marketing campaign for the original 2023 launch, a director-led video tease for the sequel’s existence in August 2026, and now a legal filing that leaked rather than an intentional drop. Each method has told fans progressively less on purpose. The original launch came with trailers, demos, and press previews. The August tease gave fans a face and a promise, but no title. The trademark gives a possible title, but no face, no gameplay, and no confirmation it’s even the right project. That downward trend in disclosed detail is consistent with a studio still early enough in production that it isn’t ready to control its own narrative yet, which lines up with reports that the sequel only reached full production in May 2026, just four months before the filing surfaced.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Wonders of O confirmed to be the Lies of P sequel?
No. Neowiz has not officially linked the trademark to the Lies of P sequel. Outlets including Beebom, Exputer and Notebookcheck report the connection as a strong probability based on timing and thematic overlap, not as a confirmed fact.
Who filed the Wonders of O trademark?
Neowiz, the South Korean publisher behind Lies of P, is listed as the applicant on the EUIPO filing, dated September 10, 2026 according to Vice and Beebom.
How many copies has Lies of P sold?
Combined sales of Lies of P and its Overture expansion reached 4 million copies by March 19, 2026, up from 3 million in June 2025, according to figures Neowiz and Round8 Studio disclosed directly.
Has Neowiz confirmed a Lies of P sequel exists?
Yes. Neowiz confirmed a sequel was in development in mid-2025, and reporting indicates it reached full production by May 2026. Director Choi Ji-won also acknowledged the project on camera in an August 2026 Nintendo Life feature, without naming it.
What does the Wonders of O trademark cover?
The EUIPO filing lists categories including virtual reality game software, interactive multimedia software for playing games, and software for online multiplayer access, broad language typical of a pre-announcement filing rather than a title-specific product description.
Is Wonders of O connected to The Wizard of Oz?
That’s speculation, though well-grounded speculation. Lies of P’s original ending referenced Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and outlets including Notebookcheck and Vice have connected that detail to the new title. Neowiz has not confirmed any Oz-themed plot direction.
When will Neowiz officially reveal the Lies of P sequel?
No release window or reveal date has been announced. Based on the pattern set by comparable 2026 trademark stories around Sony’s Break In and Saber Interactive’s Bug Busters filings, an official reveal tied to a showcase event is plausible but unconfirmed.
What awards has the Lies of P franchise won?
The Overture expansion won Best Downloadable Content at the 15th New York Game Awards and Best Game Expansion at the Golden Joystick Awards, along with recognition from the Lenovo 3DJuegos Awards, the Flow Games Awards, and an Excellence and Technical Creativity Award from the Korea Game Awards.
