Valve secures DOTA name

Blizzard and Valve have come to an agreement on the outstanding issue of the DOTA trademark.

DOTA was initially a Blizzard mod for Warcraft 3, but in 2010 Valve hired one of the mod creators and announced it was working on DOTA 2. Blizzard were understandably upset by this and soon released an announcement it was working on Blizzard DOTA.

The battle came to a head this weekend and Valve has won the right to continue to use DOTA commercially for upcoming DOTA 2, while Blizzard will continue to use the name non-commercially for its community and player created content.

As a result, Blizzard has had to rename Blizzard DOTA to Blizzard All-Stars.

Rob Pardo, one of Blizzard's head honcho's, has said "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," and continued "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's Gabe Newell said that the company was pleased with the result.

"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."