Blizzard and Valve Make Up

A while back there was some legal issues between Valve and Blizzard about Valve making Dota 2, Dota originally being a Warcraft mod. But this has been sorted out according to the guys at PC Gamer where I found out about this. (The italic paragraph below is quoted from the PC Gamer article about this linked above)

Valve will retain the commercial trademark to DOTA, and will not be required to change the name of their upcoming title DOTA 2, a stand-alone sequel to the Warcraft III map. Blizzard, however, will retain the right to use the DOTA name non-commercially. This includes promoting DOTA-style maps made for Blizzard games by the community. Their in-house DOTA successor, formerly known as Blizzard DOTA, will be renamed to Blizzard All-Stars while keeping the core gameplay mostly unchanged. 

The great Gaben in the sky has commented about this ordeal stating “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.”

I don't like it when mum and dad fight and am glad they've kissed and made up.

Blizzard Vs Valve over DotA trademark

Vs

It would seem that Blizzard are appealing against Valve and there attempt to tradement DotA 2. I can see why as the original DotA game was a mod for Warcraft 3 and has had the Blizzard name behind it over all these years. However it is just that a mod, a fan made game and we all know Valve are famous for taking mods and making them full fledged games with the likes of your Counter Strike, Team Fortress and Day of Defeat. However I'm sick of frivolous lawsuits popping up every which way.

I still think every quarrel in the gaming industry should be solved by playing games. Notch mentioned about playing Quake to determine the outcome of the whole "Scrolls" thing with Bethesda a few months back. Shit like that should be the way forward. Best of Valve vs the best of Blizzard in a winner takes all DotA tournament. If Blizzard win Valve changes the name. If Valve wins they get to keep it.

You could take this principle in to other mediums as well. Take the music industry for instance, the amount of people that bitch and whine about how "this band stole my riff" or "that band is using the same chord progression as my song" bull shit (I'm looking at you Joe Satriani, yup as much as I dislike coldplay, them using as tune similar to one of your riffs is hardly worth a law suit, there are more examples but I can't think right now). Anyway crap like that could be easily sorted that out with a guitar battle.

Anyway I'm getting slightly off topic but if you want to have a read through of the appeal you can here. From the law side of things I would probably be on Blizzards side as the name has always been associated with them and they have accepted the mod as one of there own. I can't see it going anywhere as it was a fan built project and not actually owned by Blizzard.

From a gamers perspective however, I couldn't honestly give a shit what the game is called so long as it's a decent game. So my message to all those throwing lawsuits about in the gaming industry is fuck off and get back to developing video games. At the end of the day Valve could just easily change the name and this could all be over saving people a lot of time and money. The game would still be exactly the same except they'd have to think of a new name and logo. But as I said before I honestly couldn't give a crap about the name, it doesn't matter.

Ever wanted to be a panda? Now you can.

While I am not a World of Warcraft player, Blizzards latest expansion got me debating whether I should start playing due to their new race Pandaren, and if you haven't figured out what makes this new race so appealing to me, it's the fact they are pandas. That's right you will be able to play through WoW as a panda.

I find this hilarious and the picture just makes it more funny.

There's little piece on the matter over at PC Gamer which is where I came across this quite comical news if you are generally interested, here is the link.

Blizzard and Valve Want Console Unity

The two biggest PC game developers Valve and Blizzard want consoles to shed the barrier of who you can play with due to which console you may have, which you can read about here. I think this is a brilliant idea, and why PC developers had to come up with me is just plain ridiculous. I guess Valve are having there say due to their upcoming Counter Strike title that allows cross platform play between pc and playstation users. At the end of the day it would create a bigger and better gaming community and you would be able to play games with friends no matter if you have different consoles or not. Of course there are going to be console exclusives, such as Uncharted and Gears of War. But they idea would be great for games that are released on multi-platforms such as call of duty, battlefield and I'm going to say Counter Strike as this is what started Valves involvement into this issue. I look forward to hearing more about this in the future as it is frankly a spectacular idea, and for companies like Valve and Blizzard to be behind it with their PR status along with the fact they seem to listen to what there customers want, this can only be a good thing.