Lurker > TestaALT

Prestoff posted...

Wow, that was blatant. Down to the format and wording. This guy doesn't know how to plagiarize correctly, back in middle school I would use a thesaurus to find words to replace my source and then scramble the format making it hard for my teacher to accuse me of plagiarism. Never got caught for it, but I guess my way required more work lol.

That's actually still plagiarism unless you also change the structure of the sentence.

Tyranthraxus posted...

IGN, Prima, cheatcc, and a bunch of other companies have a very long history of copy/pasting straight from GameFAQs. Either FAQs or message board posts.

Sometimes you're lucky and they'll have a small cite buried in there somewhere "And when you're trying to farm this item drop soandso from GameFAQs discovered that the PS4 looks great and that it has a much higher chance of dropping if you kill the enemy during the night cycle."

+1

The legal disclaimer found in all guides now started because writers kept getting their work ripped off by magazine companies in the late 90s. You can even go to old FAQs (such as Kao Megura's FF7 FAQ, one of the best on the site) and read the legal disclaimers, which specifically forbid the big 90s magazines from plagiarizing his work.

What is perplexing in this case is that it is extremely difficult to get a job as an IGN editor. The plagiarizer got it because he himself had a somewhat successful YouTube channel. But being an IGN writer also involves living in SF on a writer's salary, which can be hard. It just feels like if one were to go through all the effort of being qualified for the job -- years of video content and residency in SF -- that they would not plagiarize to more quickly finish their work.

Dead Cells is not exactly an epic and even a lazy reviewer can get the gist of the game in only a few hours in order to write a review. The IGN plagiarism shows complete lack of effort and motivation from a person who invested so much money and time just to get the job in the first place.