Blizzard 'Confused' By Valve's 'Dota' Trademark

Blizzard Entertainment EVP of game design Rob Pardo said that Valve Software's move to trademark and develop a new game under the name "Dota" is surprising move, considering the name comes from the Defense of the Ancients mod born from the Blizzard game community. "To us, that means that you're really taking it away from the Blizzard and Warcraft III community and that just doesn't seem the right thing to do," Pardo told Eurogamer. Over the weekend at Blizzard's Blizzcon fan convention in Anaheim, CA, the World of Warcraft and StarCraft developer unveiled Blizzard DotA, a new StarCraft II map type inspired by the popular mod. Pardo said there was "a little bit of confusion" on his part about Valve's trademark, which it filed in August of this year. Valve is typically known as a strong proponent of the mod community, Pardo noted. "... It just seems a really strange move to us that Valve would go off and try to exclusively trademark the term considering it's something that's been freely available to us and everyone in the Warcraft III community up to this point," Pardo added. Defense of the Ancients is a popular mod for the Blizzard real-time strategy game Warcraft III. Valve last year hired on the pseudonymous designer "IceFrog," the custodian for the DotA Allstars variation of the mod. Valve announced that it is currently developing Dota 2 with IceFrog. Blizzard isn't the only company to question Valve's decision to trademark "Dota." Action RTS developer Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, went as far as filing for the trademark for "Defense of the Ancients," apparently to keep Valve or any other company from taking the mark. Riot, which now employs DotA Allstars creator Steve "Guinsoo" Feak and community site developer Steve "Pendragon" Mescon, argued that the name of the popular Warcraft III mod should belong to the community, not Valve Software.