Mods, games and trademarks (yeah it's about Dota)

[ríomhaire]

So I'm sure most people are familiar with Valve's tendency to hire mod teams and students to make make into commercial products. This has always been pretty straight forward in the past, with Valve hiring the team involved and making a sequel to their game. We've had so far:

• Team Fortress (A Quake Mod)
• Day of Defeat
• Counter-Strike
• Portal (Digipen students, Portal)
• Tag (more Digipen students, paint ideas for Portal 2)

But in recent times this has gotten more complicated. Left 4 Dead was originally being made by Turtle Rock Studios, the people who finished of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (which by the way passed through four different developers, not including Valve) who were then bought out by Valve and made into Valve South. I think Turtle Rock may have split off again into a separate company but I'm not sure. In any case Left 4 Dead has stayed firmly in Valve's hands.

Then we have Alien Swarm. Valve only hired three of the developers and then released this Unreal Tournament 2004 mod as a free game on Steam. As it was free no one really brought up the copyright issues that emerge from Valve not having hired all of the developers of the mod.

But now we have Defence of the Ancients, DotA, or as Valve have styled it just Dota. This is a game that has been developed by a multitude of people and already has two clone games: League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth (both with elements of the WC3 mod teams). Valve have hired, as far as we know, only one of the developers behind Defence of the Ancients Allstars (the most popular version), the project lead known only as Icefrog. He didn't create DotA but he has been the lead for a number of years. Valve have filed trademark for "dota" and others have filed for "Defence of the Ancients" and Blizzard are making their own DotA mod in retaliation and now the internet is up in arms over who should hold the rights if anyone.

Seeing as this if Halflife2.net it's obvious there will be a good deal of Valve support but I'd still like to hear everyone's opinions on this mess. I was going to include my own but I have a lecture in two minutes so I'll have to post that later.

 

[Eejit]

It's such a very gray area I can't see any universally applicable rules. I think in this case Valve can go ahead. The responses to the dota-clones thus far has been lukewarm overall, i.e. none of them have captured the feel of it correctly. Icefrog has been responsible for that 'feel' for years now, he has as much as chance of managing it as anyone.
With that in mind they of course will copyright the name for their project and close variations, and it being Valve I doubt they'll ever try to enforce it other than in the event of a commercial copycat title - not against free mods.

 

[Bad^Hat]

The responses to the dota-clones thus far has been lukewarm overall, i.e. none of them have captured the feel of it correctly. Icefrog has been responsible for that 'feel' for years now, he has as much as chance of managing it as anyone.

Unless the allegations are true, and Icefrog was actually involved in both League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth.

I don't know. Is there actually anyone involved with DotA who hasn't splintered off to make their own game yet? Seems to me that if the guys behind LoL or HoN wanted to make Dota 2, they would have snapped up the rights and done so, seeing as it was so simple for Valve to get them after the fact (capitalization notwithstanding). Actually, as far as I was aware, the HoN guys do have (or are getting) the rights to "Defense of the Ancients," so there's that. What they're planning on actually doing with them, on the other hand... *shrug*

As for Blizzard, well... they had sweet FA to do with the mod besides providing the engine, so yeah. That would be like if Valve took action against someone else for snapping up Counter-Strike while it was still just a mod. :|