League of Legends Developers Take Issue with Valve's "DotA" Trademark
Both feel that DotA should remain a "community-owned product that modders, independent developers and game fans can continue to modify and play as often as they'd like," explained in a statement to Joystiq.
Mescan thinks Valve's move is an attempt to exercise "control over its future." He feels the "DotA name should remain the property of the community at-large, as it always has." The current developer of DotA-Allstars, IceFrog, has been maintaining the project since Feak left. He was hired by Valve late last year and it appears that his team will release a version of DotA through Valve.
Feak and Mescan's comments make a few assumptions about Valve's intentions for DotA. For all we know, it will be a free game that ships with a full SDK like the recently released Alien Swarm. It could go the other way and be a regular, paid release. Valve has not made any announcement yet, but Gamescom is this week and might be a great place for an announcement.
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DougL
replyThey're right about Valve doing this to exercise control. I commented on this in the initial news entry when Valve took ownership over the term. They're also justified in making the statement about the terminology best being left to the community at large. We don't see people owning "RPG" or "MMORPG".
But in the end it's done. Nothing they can do about it.-
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I sexicuted your mom.
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If they wanted to let it remain open to developers they should have filed themselves to control it's usage the way they wanted. The world doesn't work on wishful thinking, and even though Valve is taking control in an area where they honestly do not deserve to, its their own fault for not managing their IP. It's business.
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It's whose fault for not managing the IP? The whole point of their response is that this is a community-managed mod for Warcraft, they aren't mad because Valve beat them to the copyright or something.
I suppose you can blame the community at large for not copyrighting the name, but that seems silly.
The biggest problem is that right now we don't have any details on what Valve is actually making, so I find it hard to pass judgment one way or the other on the issue. I don't think I would even go so far as these LoL guys have gone here...we just don't know what Valve is releasing, and that this point we don't know if this will be an imposition on the community or not. -
Yeah, sounds like posturing to me. Icefrog has been supporting that DOTA community they so strongly feel about all along while they went off to create their own DOTA-clone but for profit. This isn't a slag on them - from what I understand LoL does have it's own ideas and is a quality product - but I don't see where they are in a position to decide who has the "rights" to it. Also, just saying...but some former modders made the same kind of statements when Valve did the same with Counterstike and Team Fortress.
I think if anyone can remake DOTA with better polish and more mainstream appeal, Valve can do it. And if for some reason Valve manages to mess it up, I'm sure the worst case scenario is that the community renames the original DOTA as something else and goes back to working on it. I mean - it's a mod for a Blizzard game so it's not like Valve can shut the original one down even by owning the name.
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Hmmm wow when did that go up?
I don't really understand though...IceFrog working with S2? If that is the case then how is he making a game for Steam? It doesn't seem to me that he would be working for both companies on games that would directly compete against each other.-
That was before he was hired by Valve. IceFrog has been trying to get a commercial DotA project going for years now with various companies, everyone from S2, to Blizzard, to Valve.
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MOBA.
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I'm sure Valve trademarked Team Fortress - the difference is those mods aren't making money.
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i agree. i am a fan of valve and i don't think they did a bad game (alien swarm doesn't stand up to usual quality but hey it's free). however registering a dota trademark makes a bit parasite impression. they can create a dotalike game which will surely be great but it should have a new name. they are big enough to push it and they have the tools to make it a next big thing. no need to "steal" a name for the genre.
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