The ongoing trademark battle between PC developers Valve and Blizzard has finally reached a conclusion with both sides coming to an agreement over the DOTA name.
DOTA was a very popular fan mod for Blizzard's Warcraft 3, and in 2010, Valve hired one of the mod's creators and announced it was working on DOTA 2. Of course, with Blizzard recently announcing its own Blizzard DOTA, you can imagine the fuss.
The agreement reached this weekend will allow Valve to continue to use DOTA commercially while Blizzard will maintain non-commerical use of DOTA for its community, including player-created maps for Warcraft III and StarCraft II.
In addition, Blizzard will also rename its sequel Blizzard DOTA to "Blizzard All-Stars".
"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," Blizzard's Rob Pardo confirmed. "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."
Valve boss Gabe Newell added: "We're 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."
