Who Owns Dota 2?

DotA 2 is one of the most popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games in existence, with hundreds of thousands of players world-wide, a huge esports scene, an animated adaptation, and more. But who owns the titan that is DotA 2?

As of today, the beloved MOBA we all know and love as DotA 2 is officially under the ownership of Valve. However, it wasn’t always the case, especially during the early years of DotA 2’s debut. After all, its predecessor, Defense of the Ancients, was more of a community-built game.

The History of Who Owns Dota 2

To understand how DotA 2 eventually became one of Valve’s biggest games, we have to take a trip down memory lane.

DotA 2’s roots stem way back to Blizzard’s 1998 real-time strategy game, StarCraft: Blood War, which a Aeon of Strife fan created a custom map. The custom map became abundantly popular, such that it was eventually ported to Blizzard’s Warcraft 3.

While this map’s gameplay was vastly different to modern MOBAs today, it served as the basis of the competitive genre we all loved. Essentially, the custom mod lets you control a single powerful unit while the bots automatically run down three lanes on the map to eventually destroy one another’s base.

This became the inspiration for the original DotA mod, DotA Allstars, and its derivatives, such as our heroes and creeps, except this is a co-op mod which only allowed players to play against a team of bots.

Who made DotA Allstars?

And so it diverged, with the passion and popularity from this community that started in Warcraft 3. DotA Allstars was developed by several modders at the time, such as Kyle “Eul” Sommer, Steve “Guinsoo” Feak, and Neichus, with IceFrog later becoming the lead developer.

Besides the game, Steve “Pendragon” Mescon created and maintained the official community site, dota-allstars.com, until he sold the domain to Riot Games and even placed an advertisement to promote LoL.

The decision led to a massive backlash from the DotA community because the site not only served as a forum for over a million unique visitors monthly but also had community-made content, such as hero, ability, item ideas and even memes. Following this, IceFrog announced a new official DotA official site, playdota.com.

Pendragon

To every old-school DotA fan, Pendragon’s name is one of the most hated for several reasons. Firstly, he took down the official DotA community site and its contents, which were allegedly eventually used in champion ideas for Riot Games’ League of Legends. Infinitevox, a player who claimed to be behind the hero ideas for Teemo and Rammus, publicly called out Pendragon on Dota 2 Reddit for this.

Secondly, Pendragon filled an application to trademark the name Defence of the Ancients in 2010, during Dota 2’s development, and after Valve had filed a trademark on the term Dota. This decision sparked a further lawsuit as Blizzard filed suit that Valve should not own the rights to the Dota. However, this was eventually dropped by Blizzard before going to court.

After three years, Pendragon finally decided to release the DotA-Allstars forum back, albeit in an incomplete state.

These events fueled the ongoing debacle on Dota 2 vs LoL that still persists today. However, Dota 2 has been able to garner more LoL players to transition to the game out of curiosity, like this one Redditor who shared his experience.

Who makes Dota 2?

With that, Valve and IceFrog officially made Dota 2. IceFrog, the Dota 2 developer, is still active in the consistent development of Dota 2 to this day. This has been quite the rollercoaster of history about Dota 2, but we can be thankful for the actions of IceFrog and the DotA community in maintaining this legacy as Dota 2.