Blizzard's eSports overlap with Valve is 'not intentional'

The overlapping dates of Blizzard's StarCraft 2 World Championship Series Season 2 regional finals and Valve's Dota 2 competition, The International 3, were unintentional and decided due to a "small window of opportunity," Blizzard senior manager of eSports Kim Phan said via Reddit.

Blizzard announced dates for its league finals earlier this week, with competition kicking off in Korea today. Events in Europe and America will take place Aug. 5-8, which coincides with Valve's Dota 2 championships Aug. 7-11. According to Phan, deciding dates was a complicated process dependent on many factors.

"What we knew is that we wanted to have ESL produce a world-class finals event at Gamescom in Germany in late August, which they'll be announcing more details about very soon," Phan wrote. "That meant working the schedule backward from that point. In order to give partners enough time to plan and execute for a global Season 2 Finals at Gamescom, there was only a small window of opportunity for us to have the various regional finals."

Phan added that this resulted in the overlap of the two events, and that the conflicts "were certainly not intentional."

"This simple fact is that as eSports has grown with more events, more games, and more viewers; it's nearly impossible to avoid all conflicts," Phan wrote. "Many major weekend events already host multiple games, which are running simultaneous game streams in conflict with each other.

"That said, we do understand the various concerns that players, teams, and viewers have with this particular conflict and as we have in the past, will continue to do our best to avoid this type of overlap in the future."

Valve and Blizzard have gone head-to-head before, specifically over the DOTA trademark. In May of last year, the two companies agreed to share the trademark. Valve retained the name Dota 2 for its title, while Blizzard renamed Blizzard DOTA to Blizzard All-Stars.