The tale of the stolen tales...

So, for the last week, a huge story has been slowly been unraveling between a YouTuber named Boomstick Gaming, and a former editor at IGN. Yes, former, and this the tale of how it became so.

It all started when BSG posted a review for Dead Cells, the recently released Dark Souls/Castlevania style game, back on July 24th, 2018. This editor, whose name is Filip Miucin, posted his video and written review on August 6th, 2018. Now BSG had noticed something extremely odd with Filip's video, it sounded and looked an awful lot like his own. He was right. After doing a side by side comparison, and showing solid evidence that something was amiss, the story caught a lot of wind from the gaming community, and eventually IGN itself. The video was taken down, and IGN apologized quickly to BSG, even offering to give him money lost in revenue as payback. You would think it would end there, where the dude plagiarizing someone's work gets justly fired, the small YouTuber who was just trying to make a small living was finally getting some recognition, and everything would be alright in the world. Well come on now, does that sound right? Or like a Hollywood movie? Filip made a video on August 11th, 2018 detailing his apology to IGN, but failing to even utter a single solitary sorry to BGS, who he fucked over, even once. He also "tried" to kick dirt on Jason Schreier for just pointing other times and places in which Filip stole content from other people. He went on to victimize himself, saying Jason was "Just doing it for clicks" or something of that nature. He went and challenged Jason and Kotaku to "Please let me know if you find anything..."when scouring through his other videos and work for plagiarism.

Whoops.

As confident as he sounded, it didn't take Jason long to find more, a LOT more. Filip copied stuff from Engadget's reviews, Polygon's reviews, Neo Gaf posts, and so much more, I'll just leave a screen shot of some of the stuff one Reddit user gathered together that is seriously disappointing.

He even stole from a WIKI page! The poor bastard couldn't even make a legit LinkedIn page! But it doesn't end there, as of the posting of this story from myself, there are multiple videos on his YouTube of things he has reviewed or talked about that seem to have been plagiarized as well, dating all the way back to the beginning of 2017. So this isn't even new for him, this is a learned behavior of his, and it's quite sad. The most ridiculous thing though out of all of this, is realizing that he didn't just pull stuff from other reviewers and sites, he stole shit from his own people. IGN's Seth Macy had things taken from his Octopath review, and to put it bluntly, he was pissed. I can't blame him one bit. So of course, IGN had to pull all of his stuff down while they sorted through the litany of shit Filip left on their doorstep. Dan Stapleton, the Executive Editor of IGN, was on Twitter telling everyone it was all coming down overnight, and for the most part it has. I don't think even one story is still up of his, even though another high ranking IGN staffer said some of it "might come back" as long as it's not stolen. But after seeing everything above, as well as seeing everything Jason has found on the poor sap, I hardly doubt any of it was.

So what is there to take from this? Well first off, for fucksake, don't plagiarize. For one, it's a messed up practice, and if you're going to right a review for something, anything, it should come from YOU. A review isn't just a warning to customers, it's a sample size of your passion. What makes you FEEL? Stealing a review, doesn't show or express how YOU feel about a product. The other side of that too is, how would you feel if someone stole your thunder, when you did all the work? The second thing is, with the internet, you'll never get away with it. People will find the archives of your stuff, and people will lash out at you. Filip didn't help his stock in the game reviewing world, and hurt a lot more of us in the process. So learn his lesson PLEASE, and don't steal other people's work.

So that's it from me for now, I hope you learned something today. This was the main story I wanted to talk about from last week so that's why there wasn't a SotW. There should be one this Sunday, so stay tuned for that. I'll talk to you guys soon, have fun, and stay safe.