DotA developers voice concern over Valve's 'DOTA' trademark

I understand where he's coming from, but I don't see how trademarking the name can just let them control the genre. I mean you have League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth, both are DoTA style games, one of them you even have to pay for

People bother too much. They didn't trademark the full title for a reason.

'cuz Valve would totally sue modders and developers the second someone mentions Dota in their game.
...ungrateful pricks.

If there is one company that you don't have to worry too much about taking over a franchise and limiting community access, i think it's Valve.

Do these guys not know the story of Counter-strike, G-mod, the Portal expansion, etc.?

Valve really? I think the bigger fear is that the Valve game will be better and take people from them. Accusing Valve of stopping a community from modding and making a game theirs is insane.

Especially when LOL is free but you buy each character. I love league of Legends but I see why they don't want valve there. This seems to be more "I'm afraid the Valve version will be a house hold name, and out shadow lesser ones".

F Guinsoo and his crappy Allstar mod, the community complained when he named his ripoff DotA and gave no credit to Eul.

Defense of the Ancients was 1000x better than Allstars, only problem is they were never able to port it to TFT

I love these type of games and have been hammering League of Legends lately. What they really need is a label that accurately reflects the type of unique gameplay.

If anyone has played Monday Night Combat, their "Crossfire" mode is very similar to that of DotA in that you keep pushing behind your team's bots to get the opposing teams money ball (in their base) and have the ability to build turrets instead of defending the ones that already exist (in DotA games).

We need a label !!!

Well, they can just trademark the name for all we care as long as they keep it free and developed openly by the community for the community.

I find many of the comments in this thread perplexing. DotA is a community driven, freely-distributed mod for Warcraft 3. Valve has seemingly decided to make a version in-house. That is great news. I like Valve's products.

HOWEVER, it is strange that Valve should seek to trademark the name DotA. Legally, there is only one reason to trademark a name: to enforce a property right in that name. *BUT DotA DOESN'T BELONG TO VALVE.*

Responses on this thread are generally themed:

*Well, Valve makes good games.
or
*Well, Valve lets people mod their games and is not bullish about their trademark rights.
or more generally,
*Well, Valve is a nice company (not evil, like Activision).

Those comments are all fine, good and arguably correct, but none of them discredits the legitimate concern over a company trademarking a community name. It's great that Valve has built up consumer trust. But I trust a lot of people, and that doesn't mean that I freely hand them the deed to my house.

Moreover, even if we trust Valve to allow the COMMUNITY to release mods, it is highly questionable that they should enforce a trademark right in "DotA" against ANYONE. If a few indie devs put together a great XBL version of DotA and wanted to sell it, they now cannot without Valve's permission, even though that name does not (or should not) belong to Valve. That's the issue.

This plays into the larger issue of gamers' desire to personify publishers and imbue them with soap operatic levels of intent and morality. Activision is pure evil, and every product published by them is probably poison (Ironically, Activision probably has a more common sense claim to ownership of DotA than Valve, since Warcraft 3 is its IP). On the other hand, everything Valve does is good and wise and certainly done for our benefit. They cannot be criticized.

I have a feeling this is more about protecting the trademark (like the people who trademarked "Open Source" and so forth) rather than taking over the name.

@Sally You were probably voted down for not understanding the article. It's not that they think Valve will ruin DotA, they even say in the article that they are looking forward to what Valve will do with a game in the DotA genre.

The reason they are upset is that Valve decided to trademark the term "DotA" which they believe should be a community-owned word, not a word that belongs to a single large company.

@Sally Because you somehow think Valve exists for the betterment of mankind and is not a corporation with the singular goal of making money.

It's just like how Nintendo fanboys used to think Nintendo was like that. No, you're delusional.

I thought that every custom maps, names, entities and such that spawned out of WC3 engines legally belong to Blizzard?

IMO Valve trademarks it to protect themselves from people who try and profit from their games. I'm sure they are not going to sue fans who do fan projects. aka tf2 and gang garrison. Also better valve then another company

Riot doesn't have their "panties in a bunch" as one poster said. This was just the opinion of a couple of guys who helped make DotA great and don't want to see their old project privatized.

Food for thought: I don't think it would be cool if Blizzard had trademarked Counter Strike in 2002. They didn't have anything to do with it. It was a mod of a Valve game and Valve was really the only company that had the right to bring Counter Strike into their fold. But now it seems they aren't content to bring their own mods into their fold, they want to start annexing mods of OTHER games that they didn't have anything to do with. That's where I draw the line.

Valve, bring on your MOBA. We all want to try it. But don't try and trademark DotA. Call your MOBA something fresh that stands on its own. And for the record, I don't think Icefrog has devs worried. He was in charge of HoN and that game is nearing irrelevance.

yea... LoL needs to chill out. Theres no point in NOT using the name dota. There is already a general term for this type of game, which is Moba. They are just scared.. as they should be. I mean who else is going to use the name? Icefrog was the only one working on Dota at the end, the other developers have moved on and could care less. Now if some random kid takes the "dota" name and makes a game on bnet... no one would play it anyways. So there is no need for the community to keep the name dota.. icefrog has full right to using that name for his new game.