Ask Gauss

Sunday really that is what day it is. Trust me when I woke up this morning I was questioning myself to if I was seeing things or not. It is the truth though and instead of wondering where in the hell my weekend went I am up and ready to right today's Ask Gauss post. Oh yes the post of the week where I sit back and answer some of the questions sent to me throughout the week.

What are your thoughts on Valve trying to Trademark DotA?

For those who don't know DotA 2 is a game which is coming out created by the Valve cooperation. It will be in the spirit of the popular mod of the Warcraft III. Now obviously Blizzard is up and arms over this and here is there statement on it.

"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...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".

Valve then came back with this statement

"The issue with that was, when we were talking with IceFrog 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. I haven't had any customers or gamers react negatively to it. They seem to be pretty comfortable with it."

This then came back again to Blizzard who responded with this

"DOTA, that for more than seven years has been used exclusively by Blizzard and its fan community, under license from Blizzard. By virtue of that use, the DOTA mark has become firmly associated in the mind of consumers with Blizzard, including to signify a highly popular scenario or variant of one of Blizzard's best-selling computer games, Warcraft III...

In contrast to Blizzard, Applicant Valve Corporation ("Valve") has never used the mark DOTA in connection with any product or service that currently is available to the public. By attempting to register the mark DOTA, Valve seeks to appropriate the more than seven years of goodwill that Blizzard has developed in the mark DOTA and in its Warcraft III computer game and take for itself a name that has come to signify the product of years of time and energy expended by Blizzard and by fans of Warcraft III. "

Now what is my whole opinion on this? Well Blizzard never trademarked it because they never felt the need to do so because it was a community development. They never expected another company would go behind their back and do something like this. So Blizzard is in the right for being upset although I think from now on they might change the way they go about things.

So only 100k subs lost, is this a good thing?

I think this means WoW is stabilizing around the 10M subscriber number. This to me makes sense. Month to month people are going to be playing other games and doing the "new thing", but those who enjoy playing will be playing. Yes the numbers will be inflated when expansions come out, but that is expected. I expect Blizzard to stay around this mark for awhile and maybe even slightly higher when MoP comes out.

Are you pissed that you signed up for the annual pass and Diablo III is still not out?

Why would I be pissed? f you signed up for the Annual Pass because you think that would get you D3 quicker then you are by far an idiot, and most likely play a Ret Pally.

There you have it, questions answered for the week. Hope you all got something out of it. Enjoy what is left of your weekend!