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IGN's plagiarism controversy continues to grow

Pretty much all of Filip Miucin's work has been removed.

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Recently IGN experienced something no media site wants to experience: one of their editors was accused of plagiarism. Filip Miucin had written a review of Dead Cells, which bore a striking resemblance to YouTuber Boomstick Gaming's review of the same game, and after IGN investigated and found the similarities to be too big for mere coincidence, they fired Miucin.

According to GameRevolution, Miucin posted a video on his YouTube-channel (which has since been removed), where he said the plagiarism was "not at all intentional", and urged his readers/viewers to check his other reviews, which would prove that he hadn't plagiarised anything. That's just what people did, who found several more instances of his work bearing a strong resemblance to that of others, among them his review of FIFA 18 on Switch, Octopath Traveler, and a video explaining the Nintendo Switch HD Rumble.

Now IGN has decided to remove basically everything Miucin has ever produced for them, with IGN Editorial Manager Justin Davis stating in a forum post on ResetEra that:

"FYI it's looking more and more likely that most of [Filip's] work published on IGN has editorial copy in it sufficiently derivative of previously-published work that it is a significant ethical breach and will need to be removed. We are moving on it as fast as we can as a Senior Editorial staff."

"There are complications. Including challenges around removing review scores and the way out site CMS works (which is why Dead Cells unfortunately displayed a "0.0 Disaster" score for a time)."

"A final decision hasn't been made but I think the most likely outcome is all of his work will be removed, and we'll decide from there what we need to do in terms of replacing the back-catalogue of critical content we owe game makers. "

It's a sticky situation that's impacting IGN, their audience, and the developers whose games they have reviewed. The IGN staff are naturally angry and disappointed, and trying their best to rectify the situation. Like IGN Producer Brian Altano says in a tweet:

"I feel completely betrayed by somebody I thought was a colleague, co-host and friend. I know many of you do too. Thank you for sticking with us through this."

What do you think about the situation?

IGN's plagiarism controversy continues to grow


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