It's been sort of known for a while now, but today Valve came out and specifically stated that DOTA 2 will be free-to-play. And just like Team Fortress 2 these days, the company will make its money back not from game sales, but from hats.

There'll be a DOTA 2 Store available at launch (actually, it's live now!) that will sell clothes, accessories and other cosmetic items. That's it. Valve says "Dota 2 will not be a pay-to-win game. All the items in the store are cosmetic, and don't affect gameplay."

Because of that, all heroes in the game will be free and available to everyone. You'll even be able to get hold of the cosmetic stuff without paying if you feel like putting the work in, as "players who don't want to buy things from the Dota 2 Store will be able to earn them in a variety of ways, such as by simply playing the game, increasing their Battle Level, or by trading with other players."

As someone who paid $15 over my career to Battlefield Heroes for fancy jackets - the only "microtransaction" stuff I've ever parted with real money for - I've long hoped more publishers went down this path, instead of restricting necessary content behind paywalls. Good to see Valve, at least, agrees.

DOTA 2 will also be part of the Steam Workshop, meaning fans can help create stuff that has the potential to end up in the game itself.

Introducing the Dota Store [Valve]

Toby "Tobi Wan" Dawson is a professional commentator for esports site JoinDOTA. He covers DOTA and now DOTA 2 matches and tournaments, and is considered to be quite entertaining. Unfortunately, the commentary he was caught making while playing in a live-streamed public match over the weekend is not so much entertaining as it is inexplicably racist.

The comment, as seen in a screenshot, was: "have you heard the expression..lame as a ni**ers baby?"

He later apologized on the JoinDOTA forum, explaining, "it is not ok, that is rage combined with [the other player's] jokes to create a completely inappropriate comment which I am sorry for making."

Interest in DOTA 2 continues to ramp up as the game, published by Valve, runs in beta. Tobi Wan was a commentator at Valve's official tournament, The International, when it debuted at Gamescom last year. This year's tournament will take place at PAX Prime in Seattle at the end of August.

Valve is explicitly trying to encourage civility and good behavior in their multiplayer communities. The best time to make sure that DOTA 2's community grows to be a positive influence on the game is now. While the usual arguments are raging, the community seems to agree that even in the heat and adrenaline of competition, some language is out of bounds.

Two of gaming's best and most beloved video game studios are no longer squabbling about the word DoTA. The makers of World of Warcraft and the creators of Half-Life jointly announced in a blast to the press today that they have reached "a mutual agreement regarding concerns over names of upcoming products."

Peace in our time!

The agreement: Valve will still be making a game called DOTA 2 and use the DOTA term commercially (translation: on things you can buy). Blizzard will keep using the term non-commercially for Warcraft III and StarCraft II maps.

Blizzard is changing the name of its planned Blizzard DOTA custom game in StarCraft II, which will now be called Blizzard All-Stars. That name, Blizzard's Rob Pardo said, "better reflects the design of our game."

This resolves what was becoming an ugly trademark dispute between two fan-favorite game studios.

The DoTA term, short for "Defense of the Ancients", was a fan-made mod that was made in 2003 for Blizzard's Warcraft III. It involved a specific multiplayer game-type that involved players protecting opposing waves of minions. DoTA games have been surging in popularity thanks to games such as League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth. Valve entered the fray in 2010, raising eyebrows with their intent to team up with a top DoTA developer to make a game they'd call DoTA 2. They began pursuing a trademark of the DoTA term. Blizzard objected and recently tried to block the trademark, a few months after announcing that it was making its own official Blizzard DoTA game featuring characters from the companies popular series like World of Warcraft and Diablo.

It was getting awkward. Valve was issuing complaints like this to the U.S. government's trademark office: "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 it seems resolved between these two heavyweights.

Blizzard's Pardo: "Both Blizzard and Valve recognize that, at the end of the day, players just want to be able to play the games they're looking forward to, so we're happy to come to an agreement that helps both of us stay focused on that."

Valve's Gabe Newell: "We're pleased that we could come to an agreement with Blizzard without drawing things out in a way that would benefit no one. We both want to focus on the things our fans care about, creating and shipping great games for our communities."

League of Legends creators' at Riot Games have previously said that they'd object to Valve trademarking DoTA. Kotaku has reached out to Riot to clarify where they stand on this matter and will update when we hear back.

Reader Adam has an idea. An idea for old-timey bottles of rum, bottled by Valve Corporation, and named for Admiral Kunkka, a hero from the DOTA series. It is a wonderful idea.

Those wondering, um, why rum, Kunkka's Rum is found in both the original and Valve's upcoming sequel, with units doused in it receiving a bonus.

Adam went completely over the top with this, even going to the trouble of buying a custom rubber stamp and actual bottling wax.

There are more pics on Adam's site.

YO-HO-HO…[adammcbeamish]

LAN support is a dying breed in modern PC gaming. But don't tell the upcoming DOTA 2 this, as Valve's game will let you drag a dekstop, pizza and sleeping bag to your friend's place to your heart's content. [PC Gamer]

It's no box of chocolates or a rose - or a diamond ring - but it'll do.

These are Valve's official character art sheets for the heroes Lone Druid, Lycan, and Shadow Demon.

If you'd like to see some other example of DOTA 2 character art, check out this Fine Art feature from last year, which featured a ton of it.

And before anyone asks, no, Valve has not returned our calls about that whole DOTA 2 legal mess.

Peter König is a concept art legend. Over the past quarter of a century his creature designs, sculptures and animation work have been featured in blockbuster hits like Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers and Cloverfield.

Which is all well and good, but he's also spent the last four years working as a concept artist, modeller and texture artist at Valve, where he's lent his talents to the Left 4 Dead series, Portal 2 and DOTA 2.

While there sadly aren't any images from Portal, and only one from DOTA 2, König's Left 4 Dead stuff is a treasure trove of the walking dead, rotting flesh and rejected designs for special infected that involved shooting rats out of a zombie's stomach.

You can see a nice collection of König's body of work, both in games and cinema, at his personal site.

Stanley Lau is one talented artist. Kotaku previously featured him on Fine Art for his wonderful Street Fighter work. Today, it's time to look at some stunning DOTA 2 art.

DOTA 2 is, of course, the Valve-produced sequel to Defense of the Ancients (DOTA), a mod of real-time strategy game Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos.

Lau's latest work is a series on DOTA 2 heroines Lina, Crystal Maiden, Windrunner, and Drow Ranger. You can see them in the above gallery. Remember to click on each photo's lower corner to expand the image to its full size.

In case you missed it, have a look at Valve's Gabe Newell talking about making DOTA 2 and this Fine Art of DOTA 2 character art.

If you want to see more of Lau's wonderful art, check out his Deviant Art page.

DotA2 Heroines by 'Artgerm [DeviantArt, Thanks Alex!]

Most gamers know him as the guy who helped create the soulful vibe of Gordon Freeman's world in the Half-Life games. However, way before he came to Valve, Marc Laidlaw was an author with a number of published works to his name. He's kept on writing outside of video games, too, but his most recent work plops him right into another video game universe.

Over on Newsarama, Laidlaw talks about working on The Secret Shop: Are We Heroes Yet?, the webcomic that spotlights the Shopkeeper, a.ka. the guy with all the hook-ups in the popular PC franchise. One of the highlights from the interview offers this:

Lore is continually in development, and we try to work it into all aspects of the game. Mostly, so far, that has shown up in the character vignettes that accompany each hero when you view them in the game. These are meant to give a quick verbal impression of the hero in a heroic moment, with just enough evocative imagery behind them to make you want to go deeper into the story, and they are meant to be very short and highly distilled. Creating the comic was the first place where we had a chance to work our way more deeply into the lore, and to lay out some of the concepts we've developed. Ideally, we can keep finding stories that let us flesh out the underpinnings of the DotA universe in compelling ways.

Of course, the main part of the DOTA experience happens in the games and the release of DOTA 2 is one of the most anicpated things anywhere. People really, really want to get into the beta. As it turns out, the final entry of the Secret Shop webcomic holds a survey that could get you into the beta. You'll need Steam, of course, but most anybody who's itching to get in the DOTA 2 beta probably has it already.

Opening the VALVE to DOTA 2 Webcomics: Are we Heroes Yet? [Newsarama]

While the game's not out yet, Valve's sequel to the super-popular WarCraft mod already gets a thumbs up from this feature for its gorgeous character art.

It's being used once or twice a week to accompany the reveal of new characters and/or features for the game, and seeing as it hasn't been plastered all over the internet, I figured it was worth collecting it all in a single gallery.

Note that this isn't all of it! There are more heroes to dress up this nice as the game gets closer to release, at which time we'll probably check back in and do this all over again.

Also included are the original four pieces of character art released for the game because, well, they're badass enough for a second (or third!) look.

Dota 2 is currently in closed beta, with invites going out, oh, maybe as you read this.

To see the larger pics in all their glory (or so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on the "expand" icon on the main image above and select "open in new tab".