Coverage of various public events, game shows, and conferences featuring Diablo III.

Jay Wilson commented on how games are (or are not) influenced by early showings: [1]

AG: Blizzard has always been great at showing games to people at an early stage and I'm interested in that idea. Do you think there are risks of showing games to people early? What's your philosophy behind that?

Jay: There's only a risk – this is going to sound snarky – but there's only a risk to your ego. If your game is good then people will recognise that it's good. If it's not good, then you need to learn from that and make it better. A lot of the times I think people don't want to show their game early. It's something that some clutch close to their chests – they don't want something that misrepresents them. I can understand that, but the thing is – players only remember the last thing you showed them. So if you show them something and they're like "oh my god that was horrible" then you go "oh geez, then let's go back and make it better". But at least now you know why, at least now you have some information.

One of the reasons why we actually prefer a really long window before we release a game is because we want a lot of feedback; we want to hear what people like and don't like about it; we want to give them several opportunities to play it before release. We play our games constantly before we release them; we give them to the other development teams and we get feedback. We do very long betas and alphas that we include a lot of people – not just from the fanbase, but from the game industry as a whole. We get a lot of other game developers playing our games – months and months before we release – and I would say, look at the success of Blizzard games. If other companies think it's a risk, a bad idea... obviously it's not, because we've done very well on that front.