Diablo IV Interview's Questions From 'Fans' Are Very Questionable [Update]

Last week a video was released featuring two senior developers working on Diablo IV: Associate Game Director Joseph Piepiora and Art Director John Mueller. In the clip the pair were presented with a series of questions from “fans”, which they answer at length, but it didn’t take long for some digging to find that the questions were…oddly specific.

Here’s the video, posted on the Future Games Show channel, and made I guess to promote both the game and the event, which is an annual showcase for the British media publisher, and in particular its video game site GamesRadar:

Philtacular was watching and was among those who thought the questions were a little weird, though, and with the Future Game Show so helpfully providing each question-asker’s social media information, they looked up each one.

Uh oh, only 1 tweet, 13 years ago 🤔 pic.twitter.com/FV1Jv1Sic1

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

That’s not a one-off, though! There are loads of these!

Uh oh, looks like that account was literally created TODAY after someone on twitch found out it was made by an account that never existed pic.twitter.com/BFkH2kfedr

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

I won’t keep pasting them, but there are accounts from other sites too, like Reddit, which also have zero trace of ever having actually asked those questions. This has of course led to allegations that the questions were fabricated, a ruse that could at least partially be explained by the fact the FGS asked for community questions for a Diablo IV interview back on May 13 and…didn’t receive a single reply.

We're sitting down with Diablo IV developers next week to answer community questions!

Reply with YOUR questions for the devs….

#DiabloIV pic.twitter.com/LTRJBRPR5Z

— FutureGamesShow (@FutureGamesShow) May 13, 2023

I asked both the FGS and Blizzard for comment, and Blizzard has responded, telling Kotaku “Blizzard was not involved in the process of gathering questions”. A community rep also posted about the video in the Diablo subreddit, saying “this was an interview Joe and John did on a EU press tour last week with numerous outlets. [These] interview questions came from the media outlet and we just answer them. The team is following up with the outlet to ask where the questions came from.”

If the questions were indeed made up, this is simply the funniest example possible of the pointlessness in putting these forgettable pre-release promos together; what was so immovable about this arrangement that, having apparently received zero actual questions, some shit was seemingly made up rather than, I dunno, getting staff at GamesRadar—a video game website putting the event together—to ask some questions instead? Why bother? It’s such a dumb scandal over something nobody would have cared about otherwise!

Update 5/30/2023 12:04 p.m. ET: The Future Game Show channel posted an update on the situation in the YouTube comments of the video interview in question. “We messed up,” it begins. The seemingly bogus user handles for some of the questions were apparently randomly generated to keep the original fans behind the questions anonymous. It’s not clear how some of the fictional names ended being the exact same as real, inactive Twitter accounts. Here’s the full statement:

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.