Valve Trademarks 'DOTA' 141
An anonymous reader tips news that Valve Software has filed a trademark claim for the term "DOTA," fueling speculation that the company will soon reveal a new Defense of the Ancients game. Voice actor John St. John recently said he was recording for such a game in a post to Twitter. The tweet was subsequently deleted. Last year Valve hired 'Icefrog,' lead developer for the original DotA mod.
At first I was angry (Score:1, Interesting)
Then I saw that they had the original DotA developer on board. Then I just got worried that DoTA for WC3 and its clone on SC2 would get sued.
Re:Business model (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey it's a sound business model that results in quality polished games. Can't knock them for it. :)
Re:At first I was angry (Score:5, Interesting)
Except they don't. They have the second maintainer of DotA Allstars on board (the original developer of that worked on League of Legends). DotA itself was made by yet another person who isn't involved in either of them.
I'd love to know how you trademark something made by someone else and which someone else has already used on released games.
Re:Ok but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is why I didn't say HL3 or HL4, just "the next game". There is also the potential for a prequel, or a game from a different point of view, like they did with Opposing Force and Blue Shift. Simply staying in the same time and universe, there is huge potential for a game where you don't even see Gordon, as a Combine, or play a citizen that organizes the underground railroad, etc. Personally, I would love to play a game as DOG, with the gravity gun and maybe one or two other "powers", doing combat while Gordon is elsewhere. Just kicking Combine ass and breaking stuff. These would likely be smaller/shorter games, but the potential is still there for some cool $19.99 games or part of a pack of games, like the Orange Box.
They would be expanding on the current universe, and while not adding much depth, they would add breadth to the series while being easy enough to keep to the original canon. While Opposing Force and Blue Shift were not as good as the original HL, (the main issues that held them back was some game play quirkiness and some of the tasks were a bit too much of a grind) but they were still good games in the same universe and worth playing through more than once.
Re:Valve should get its priorities straight... (Score:2, Interesting)
How was this even found? (Score:2, Interesting)
I know this is only slightly on topic- but how was this registration found? Did they have to pay money to search the system?
What if I wanted to just go searching for a term? Or for all terms registered by a company? What stops people from doing that?
LoL, HoN, and DotA (Score:3, Interesting)
"Although I doubt they can beat the price of LoL." There's also problems here. Speaking as someone who currently plays LoL (I might have a solo rating higher than 1250 if I played more than a few games a week), there's a lot of whinging right now about the constant nickel-and-diming of LoL's pricing structure. It is possible to earn nearly everything in the game through just grinding matches (character skins being the only true exception), but the point cost of purchasing new characters and stat-enhancing runes is so high that anyone wanting to play at a truly competitive level ends up needing to spend some money for boosts eventually. It's a model that works fine for purely casual play, but I count myself as one of the people that wishes we could just pay $50 flat and get everything so that we could play high-level matches right away.
Having said all of that, I had no interest in DotA until my friends online got me into LoL, which has been a lot of fun despite some issues. I haven't had much interest in HoN, but I wouldn't mind seeing what the new DotA project ends up looking like.