According to Valve's founder and managing director, Gabe Newell, Valve's investment in DotA was sparked from the collective interest of veteran employees who had attempted to partake in team play at a competitive level. As their interest in the game grew, they began corresponding with DotA's developer, IceFrog, over a series of emails, inquiring what long-term plans the scenario's developer had.[8] The emails eventually culminated in an invitation from Valve's project manager, Erik Johnson, offering IceFrog a tour of the company's facilities and as a result, claimed to have "hired him on the spot".[9] The first public notification regarding the development of Dota 2 was a blog post made by IceFrog, stating that he would be leading a team at Valve.[10] No official word was given until its official announcement on October 13, 2010, when the website of magazine Game Informer revealed specific details about the game and its development,[2] creating traffic on the website nearly to the extent of crashing their servers.[11] Later that day Valve released the official press release for the game.[12] Erik Johnson addressed the confusion over the written form of the brand name, citing it as "Dota," rather than "DotA," due to its increasing context as a concept, rather than an acronym for "Defense of the Ancients".[9]
Shortly following a Q&A by IceFrog on the website of Defense of the Ancients, elaborating on his recruitment by Valve, a trademark filing claim was made by the company on August 6, 2010.[13] Steve "Guinsoo" Feak, the original developer of the DotA Allstars variant and Steve "Pendragon" Mescon, the creator of dota-allstars.com and director of community relations for Riot Games, expressed their concern that Valve should not trademark the DotA name, due to their views that it should remain as a community asset. On August 9, 2010, Mescon filed an opposing trademark for "DOTA" on behalf of DotA-Allstars, LLC, a subsidiary of Riot Games, in order to "protect the work that dozens of authors have done to create the game".[14] Rob Pardo, the executive vice president of Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of Warcraft III, expressed a similar concern, explaining that the DotA name should remain within the Warcraft III community. Blizzard acquired DotA-Allstars, LLC from Riot Games in 2011, to enforce their claim as not only the creators of the Warcraft III World Editor, but to have the rights from a company that made a claim to the mod previously.[15] During the game's unveiling at Gamescom 2011, Gabe Newell explained Valve's perspective on acquring the trademark, which was that IceFrog desired to develop a direct sequel to DotA and that players would likely recognize it as such.[16] Blizzard filed an opposition against Valve in November of 2011, citing the Warcraft III World Editor and their ownership of DotA-Allstars, LLC as a proper claim on the franchise.[15]
