The URL-registration detectors and trademark-sifters over at SuperAnnuation are the best in the business when it comes to reporting about websites other publishers are registering and trademarks developers are filing. For example, the blog was responsible for letting us know the name (and possible alternatives) of the upcoming Batman: Arkham City. Today, they've provided us with another reveal: Valve Software has filed a trademark for something called "DOTA."
Of course, DOTA is no ordinary nonsense phrase. It's the common acronym for Defense of the Ancients, the hugely popular Warcraft III mod that is still being developed and played and populated by mean Internet scumbags eight years later. Between this trademark and the fact that IceFrog, the anonymous developer who has been managing and developing the original DOTA mod for the past five years, was hired by Valve to work on a new project... yeah. Valve is probably making its own clone of Defense of the Ancients with the involvement of one of the modification's developers.
Perhaps the most shocking takeaway from this story is the implication that Valve's game could just be called DOTA. The idea of taking the widely known acronym of a game and using it as a title for a different game that happens to be in the same genre as the original game is bananas. It would be like if I announced that I was making a video game called KOTOR, a science fiction RPG which happens to be about a space knight with a laser sword. It's egregious, is what it is!
Rather, it could be egregious. We don't really know anything about what this game is, or if it's even a game at all. There's a possibility that this DOTA trademark has nothing to do with anything related to Defense of the Ancients.
It could be Half-Life 3. Maybe. But it's probably DotA-ass DOTA.