Pardo: Valve trademarking DOTA "doesn’t seem the right thing to do"

Valve's attempts to trademark Defence of the Ancients - DOTA, for short - "doesn't seem the right thing to do," Blizzard boss Rob Pardo's told Eurogamer.

Pardo, who's been all over the news from Blizzcon this weekend, told the site it was confused by what Valve was doing following its announcement of a stand-alone sequel to the mod, which originated from Warcraft III.

The team behind the original is now working at Valve on development on DOTA 2.

"To us, that means that you're really taking it away from the Blizzard and Warcraft III community, and that just doesn't seem the right thing to do," said Pardo.

"Certainly, DOTA came out of the Blizzard community... It just seems a really strange move to us that Valve would go off and try to exclusively trademark the term considering it's something that's been freely available to us and everyone in the Warcraft III community up to this point.

"Valve is usually so pro mod community. It's such a community company that it just seems like a really strange move to us... I really don't understand why [they would do it], to be honest."

Blizzard showed off StarCraft DOTA, one of four new Blizzard-made StarCraft II mods, at Blizzcon over the weekend.

But when asked if this could raise an issue in the future, Pardo only said: "Our response is that they don't own the term DOTA at this point. It's something that they're filing for.

"Our contention is that it should continue to be available to Blizzard and to our community."

Just so you know, Valve boss Gabe Newell was snapped playing StarCraft DOTA in California at the weekend. Make of that as you will.