Blizzard Belatedly Weighs in on Valve’s DotA Trademark

Ready for one last bit of Blizzard related news, now that Blizzcon is firmly over?  Rob Pardo, the big dude (read: executive vice president of game design) over at Blizzard Entertainment, had some things to say about Valve attempting to trademark “Defense of the Ancients,” the name of the most popular Warcraft III mod out there, the community effort that spawned a brand new kind of game play.

Pardo is apparently not enthused:

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…

[We reacted with] a little bit of confusion, to be honest. Certainly, DOTA came out of the Blizzard community… 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.

Valve is usually so pro mod community. It’s such a community company that it just seems like a really strange move to us… I really don’t understand why [they would do it], to be honest.

Valve began the process of trademarking the name in August, for use in its upcoming foray into DotA gameplay, Defense of the Ancients Allstars, though the process is being opposed by one of the primary creators of DotA.  It’s worth wondering why Blizzard didn’t speak up then.

Of course it’s also worth pointing out, in this context, that Blizzard just announced that of the four free StarCraft II mods it will release soon, one of them will be called Defense of the Ancients, and feature characters from all three of Blizzard’s big franchises.

(via Eurogamer.)