Diablo 4 Q&A hosts respond to “fake” questions controversy with explanation

The hosts of a Q&A with the developers of Diablo 4 have responded to suspicions that the softball questions were faked- by saying the questions were real, but the names of the people asking them had been made up to provide anonymity.

Future Games Show, run by GamesRadar, hosted a Q&A with developers working on the widely-anticipated Diablo 4, in a segment called “Diablo 4 devs answer YOUR questions.”

The idea behind it was to give the community a direct line to developers, and allow them to ask questions about the upcoming game. However, watchers noticed that the questions were suspiciously soft, with queries like “The cutscenes are gorgeous! How important was it to get these as high quality as they are in the game?”

Another question was: “Thanks for putting co-op in the game! I imagine this makes development significantly harder, why was it so important to include this in Diablo IV?”

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 – wishlist DEATH MACHINE 💢 (@pixelsbyphil) May 26, 2023

One sleuth on Twitter decided to track down the accounts that had “asked” the questions, and found that many of the accounts hadn’t posted anything in years, and didn’t seem to be engaged with the Q&A.

Twitch streamer Quin69 also reacted to the video, and pointed out that both usernames and the questions themself seemed suspicious. After looking them up, he discovered that none of the mentioned usernames were actual profiles on Reddit or Twitter.

Diablo 4 Q&A hosts respond to fake questions suspicions

However, the hosts of the Q and A, Future Games Show, addressed the suspicions in a pinned comment underneath the interview.

They said that rather than the questions being entirely from Diablo fans, they were instead a combination of fan questions and “questions from members of the FGS editorial team”.

In response to the usernames who “asked” the questions not being real, the statement said: “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 platform they were submitted on- changed for the purposes of this video.

“This was not made clear in the video and we apologize 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 in the interview itself.”

FGS also said they had changed the video’s title and thumbnail to better reflect the actual structure of the interview.

It’s ultimately a small hiccup compared to the massive release of Diablo 4, but it could have been avoided with more clarity from the get-go, which FGS has acknowledged.