World of Warcraft developer Blizzard has said that it would rather change the name of its upcoming
StarCraft II mod
Blizzard Dota, rather than risk delay through a trademark dispute with Valve.
Last year,
Half Life and
Portal developer Valve revealed that it was working on a sequel to the original
Warcraft III mod
Defense of the Ancients, and
had trademarked the name.
Blizzard's EVP of game design
Rob Pardo said at the time that there was "a little bit of confusion" about the trademark, since Blizzard was planning to release its own
Dota title.
Talking to Eurogamer, Blizzard VP
Frank Pearce has now said that, while it "doesn't seem the right thing to do" on Valve's part, his company is prepared to change the name of its mod rather than seeing the mod delayed due to a trademark dispute.
"From my perspective,
Dota is a genre in this space, at this point, and almost a sub genre of the real-time strategy space," he argued. "It doesn't seem like something someone would want to trademark, but the U.S. legal system lets people do just about anything they want to try."
"I can't speak to it from a legal perspective," he continued. "From the development team and the leadership at Blizzard, we want to make great games and we want to get those great games into the hands of our fans."
"At the end of the day, the name and the label we put on that mod for
StarCraft II is not as critical as the gameplay experience we create and deliver to the fans. We will not hold back the experience from the fans because of a naming conflict. We'll find a way to get it into the hands of our fans either way."
Valve boss Gabe Newell responded, "The issue with that was, when we were talking with IceFrog [
Dota developer] originally, he wanted to build the sequel to
Dota. So the reason to call it
Dota 2 is it actually does a pretty good job of communicating to gamers what it is the game is going to be."
"If a gamer looks at this game and you ask them, is that
Dota 2? They're going to say yeah, that makes sense. That's a good name for it. That's really what's driving that."
