Given the hype for Blizzard Entertainment’s upcoming Diablo 4, fans have been eager to ask the developers questions about the game and what it is bringing to the table. Accordingly, GamesRadar’s Future Games Show team recently uploaded a fan Q&A video featuring the Diablo 4 developers in the buildup to the event on June 10. The questions asked in the video were seen by much of the community as exceptionally generic, and upon further inspection, it appears that the Future Games Show team and Blizzard Entertainment apparently used fake Twitter and Reddit accounts to ask what were perceived as “safe” pre-approved questions.

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On May 25, the Future Games Show YouTube channel uploaded a video titled “Diablo IV devs answer YOUR questions,” in which Associate Game Director Joseph Piepiora and Art Director John Mueller answered over 12 minutes’ worth of what were presumed to be fan questions. However, many of the questions were centered around the “importance” of including basic features and content or otherwise unimportant information.

On May 27, indie game developer @pixelsbyphil posted a series of tweets in which he checked the visible handles in the Q&A video against their corresponding questions, and found that many of the accounts responsible for the more generic questions did not exist before the video’s release or had been inactive for years:

So @Blizzard_Ent and @FutureGamesShow put out a “Diablo 4 Devs Answer YOUR Questions” video, but the questions seem… off. Luckily, they included the handles of the “people” asking these questions so we can easily verify them! SURELY nothing wack is going on… 🧵

— Philtacular (@pixelsbyphil) May 26, 2023

Given this information, it would be reasonable to assume that the video was a PR promotion for Diablo 4 coordinated between the Future Games Show team and Blizzard Entertainment, and did not contain any actual fan questions. The Future Games Show team has now responded to the allegations, and admits that the video used questions from both fans and the Future Games Show editorial team, and that the “fake accounts” were randomized handles that are unrelated to the actual accounts under those names:

We messed up.

This video was originally titled ‘Diablo IV devs answer YOUR questions’. The intent of the video was for Diablo IV developers to react to and answer questions from the community. However, the questions we asked the developers were a mix of questions sourced from the Diablo 4 fanbase and from members of the FGS editorial team. Some of the community users (and our team members) that submitted these questions requested to be made anonymous and so had their usernames – and the platforms they were submitted on – changed for the purposes of this video.

The new user names were randomly generated, but on further investigation some of these relate to real accounts (albeit inactive accounts with very few posts or followers) that had nothing to do with the creation of this video. This was not made clear in the video and we apologise for any confusion this has caused. Activision Blizzard and the Diablo 4 developers did NOT pre-approve these questions and were only made aware of them during the interview itself. We did not make this distinction between community-led and FGS-led editorial team questions clear, so have updated the video’s headline and thumbnail for transparency.

Thanks for your feedback. We will do better.

FGS Team

The Future Games Show team has now unlisted the Diablo 4 Q&A video owing to the negative reception, but it can still be accessed here, along with the above response in the pinned comment below the video.

Our review of Diablo 4 is hitting the site very soon, so stay tuned.