Blizzard And Valve Settle DOTA Dispute

After a rigorous DotA-session where Valve played Scourge and Gabe Newell picked Invoker, Blizzard were– okay I’m just kidding. They didn’t really settle anything in a game of DotA, but how cool would it have been if they had?

Blizzard and Valve have announced a mutual agreement over the use of the acronym ‘DOTA’ which we all know to mean “Defense Of The Ancients” but also “that game that will suck you in and spit you out a mere shadow of your former life.”

From here on out, Valve will continue to use DOTA commercially, while Blizzard’s upcoming version of DOTA will be called Blizzard All-Stars.

In February, Blizzard challenged Valve’s right to use DOTA 2 as the title of its MOBA game based entirely on the core Defense of the Ancients custom map for WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne, now maintained by one IceFrog. The case was brought to the attention of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Trial and Appeal Board by Blizzard where it sought to challenge Valve’s right to trademark the word DOTA.

“Both Blizzard and Valve recognize that, at the end of the day, players just want to be able to play the games they’re looking forward to, so we’re happy to come to an agreement that helps both of us stay focused on that,” said Rob Pardo, executive vice president of game design at Blizzard Entertainment.

“As part of this agreement, we’re going to be changing the name of Blizzard DOTA to Blizzard All-Stars, which ultimately better reflects the design of our game. We look forward to going into more detail on that at a later date.”

“We’re pleased that we could come to an agreement with Blizzard without drawing things out in a way that would benefit no one,” said Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. “We both want to focus on the thing our fans care about, creating and shipping great games for our communities.”

Blizzard will still preserve noncommercial use of DOTA for its community “with regard to player-created maps for WarCraft III and StarCraft II” with the companies announcing no further plans to discuss the agreement beyond that.

I have to say that Blizzard deserve the loss here because DotA has been around for many years and if they had enough forward thinking to see the potential gold mine that was the custom map, then they could have trademarked it ages ago. Unfortunately their lack of faith in their own community was their undoing, and Valve rightfully won the commercial trademark.

In all I would say we should all just be glad that our favourite two PC-game-making companies are done fighting, and we can all go back to loving them equally again.