In a sad bit of gaming news today, an IGN writer who had reportedly plagiarized a review of “Dead Cells” from a lesser known YouTube channel just got fired from his job. The YouTube channel, Boomstick Gaming, uploaded a video review of the new 2D action side-scroller “Dead Cells” last week, and found that a recent IGN review by Filip Miucin featured many similarities to his own. On August 6th, Boomstick Gaming released a video titled “IGN Copied my Dead Cells Review: What do I do?” in which he provides a side-by-side comparison of the two reviews emphasizing the moments of clear, unabashed, plagiarism.
Check out the video below:
Seems like Miucin is a bit new to the internet – within 48 hours, a Reddit thread highlighting Boomstick Gaming’s video appeared on the r/videos subreddit and received nearly 40 thousand upvotes. Needless to say, the news quickly reached IGN and according to an update from Kotaku, Miucin has already been fired.
In place of the original review, IGN put up an official statement regarding the issue.
Here are a few excerpts:
“Though we as a community often share feelings and even certain word choices to describe the games we love by using similar frames of understanding, this particular situation stepped over the line and is not a reflection of our editorial standards. We apologize to our readers, developer Motion Twin, and most especially the YouTuber known under Boomstick Gaming for failing to uphold those standards.”
Advertisement
Miucin’s firing and closing statement:
“We’ve parted ways with the writer involved in the review, and we will be re-reviewing Dead Cells this week. We will work tirelessly to ensure that, regardless of whether you agree with our reviews, you can have faith that every word is nothing less than the genuine opinions of our critics. Nothing is more important to us than your trust.”
Miucin originally started doing reviews on his own YouTube channel before he was hired by IGN. In the past few hours, one of the videos he has titled, “Major Channel Update – Joining Forces With IGN” has since been flooded by comments from people accosting him over the incident.
With the speed at which information can spread nowadays, it’s highly unlikely that plagiarized work can go unnoticed for long. It’s hard to say what exactly was going through Miucin’s head when he submitted that video, though one thing is for certain – he’s going to have a very hard time building up any sort of trust from now on.
