Valve and Blizzard Settle Dota 2 Claim, Valve to keep Dota Name

[Hectic Glenn]

In somewhat of a victory for Valve, a mutual agreement has been reached with Blizzard over the contested “DOTA” trademark. Blizzard were set to use the DOTA trademark as part of their upcoming game Blizzard DOTA and contested Valve’s trademark request. Instead, under the agreement, Blizzard’s new game will be titled Blizzard All-Stars allowing Valve to use the ‘DOTA’ trademark commercially.

Gabe was glad things were resolved saying “[Valve is] pleased that we could come to an agreement with Blizzard without drawing things out in a way that would benefit no one. We both want to focus on the things our fans care about, creating and shipping great games for our communities.”

Full press release below.

May 11, 2012 –Blizzard Entertainment and Valve today announced a mutual agreement regarding concerns over the names of upcoming products. In accordance with the agreement, Valve will continue to use DOTA commercially, including DOTA 2, while Blizzard will preserve noncommercial use of DOTA for its community with regard to player-created maps for Warcraft III and StarCraft II.

"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 things our fans care about, creating and shipping great games for our communities."

The companies do not plan to discuss the terms of the agreement beyond today's announcement.

/EDIT: Joystiq has also come out to say that Dota 2's release is now in 2013. Here's the source.

 

[Edeslash]

That's pretty cool of Blizzard. But what, are they doing a Dota game?

 

[Hectic Glenn]

Yeah they've been making it for a while, it was at the last Blizzon (no blizzcon this year though). It basically looks very much like a Starcraft 2 mod last I saw of it. It didn't look like a serious attempt at a separate Dota-like game, perhaps more of a reactionary game to claim the territory from Valve when the rumours of Icefrog being at Valve started, who knows?

It could look like a nicely polished competitor now, I've honestly not heard much about it since.

 

[Edeslash]

Seems silly to me. The genre is already full of games. League of Legends is absolutely massive, Dota 2 is extremely popular even though it's still in beta... Not to mention the smaller games like Heroes of Newerth etc.