Last Thursday, Future Games Show hosted a Q&A session with Diablo 4 game director Joseph Piepiora and art director John Mueller. The questions themselves were banal and the answers uninteresting, but what was more interesting were the accounts where the questions supposedly came from.
Digital artist Philtacular was first to note that the questions being asked seemed a little "off." Because Blizzard included the handles of every account asking questions, Philtacular then went sleuthing to see just who asked all these boring questions. It turns out, some of them didn't even exist.
For example, @SeZdc2 asked their question about Diablo 4's couch co-op before the account even existed on Twitter. And then there's @RobfromtheBlock, an account that does exist but one that didn't post their question until after the Q&A session had already concluded. Head to that Twitter account and you'll see that even the bio notes it's a fake account created for the FutureGamesshow.
The story continues with @EmmaRockz, an account that only has one tweet from 13 years ago, and Reddit user HeistMeister, an account that had never posted or commented until the day of the Q&A session. Another Reddit user by the name of Immolant1997 also didn't become active until the same day as the video and used its first comments to combat accusations of being a fake account.
Finally, the first question asked on the stream came from @GRYITH, aka Josh Lloyd, lead video producer for Future Games Show and the same guy who created the Q&A stream in the first place.
This has led to accusations online of Blizzard creating these fake accounts. However, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier noted that Future Games Show put out a call for questions on social media, but didn't get any responses. Or at least, didn't get any responses that it felt comfortable asking Blizzard live on camera.
You can't blame Blizzard for being a little gun shy after Diablo Immortal's disastrous 2018 debut, but this is definitely not a good look for the upcoming Diablo sequel. Diablo 4 arrives on PC and consoles on June 6.