 Oh boy, so IGN has concluded its investigation of Philip Muchin, I'm sorry, I actually do feel bad that I don't know how to properly pronounce his name, especially after he's been on IGN for nine months and obviously he has his own YouTube channel, but IGN released a statement, they have concluded their investigation on whether or not Philip Muchin plagiarized his dead cells review from Boomstick Gaming, it was our prior video, if you want more information on this, you can go down in the description and I'll link to my previous video where you can get all of the gritty details, but here's what IGN has said, we've reviewed the allegations against one of our writers regarding our review of dead cells, after taking the time to investigate, we've determined that there were substantial similarities between a review posted weeks earlier and our review that could not be justified and warranted taking down, 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, we take our review process seriously, in most cases reviewers are expected to play a game single player or story campaign to completion at least once, as well as spend additional time capturing gameplay to supply content to the video component of our reviews, though our dead cells reviewer played the game and came away with glowing opinions of it, as did many of our staff members, the review itself was simply not acceptable, 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 that 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, and to Boomstick Gaming's credit he was interviewed by Forbes magazine and he basically put out there that he didn't want Philip to be fired, mostly out of sympathy of not wanting to cause someone to lose their job, because it's hard out there, it can be tough, but apparently Boomstick Gaming himself has been unemployed for about six months and he doesn't really wish that upon anyone and that wasn't his intent in pointing out the plagiarism, but ultimately plagiarism is one of the most serious offenses you can commit in the journalistic world and when it occurs, well, that's pretty much the end of your career as a journalist, that doesn't mean that he can't return to his YouTube channel and somehow find some modicum of success there, maybe his loyal fan base will support him, but should they? And this is, I don't want to pile on Philip because this is obviously going to be a very tough time for him even though he brought this all on himself, Kotaku actually dug up something else, so this is not the first time Philip has plagiarized things, it's the first time he's done it at IGN as far as we're aware of, but he plagiarized other content on his own YouTube channel, I'm reading this straight off of Kotaku who provides links and stuff to the example, so I'll put a link down in the description to Kotaku's article on this, but it says earlier this evening that tips for pointing to Kotaku to another example of striking similarities between Muchen's work and another outlets this time before he was even hired at IGN, this excerpt comes from Nintendo Life Review of FIFA 18 for Switch posted on September 29, 2017, however, because it's not running on the Frostbite engine, FIFA 18 on Switch doesn't play exactly like other current gen versions, the pace is slightly faster and player animations and physics aren't quite as fluid, lending the game an ever so slightly more arcade feel, but not to any major degree, and then here's an excerpt from his video review that Muchen posted on October 1, 2017, only this time it's running on a custom engine that EA designed, specifically for Switch, which means that it doesn't play exactly like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 editions of the game do, the animations and physics are definitely not as fluid and the pacing feels slightly faster, ultimately leaving the game feeling a little less realistic and slightly more arcadey. Next, here's another excerpt from Nintendo Life, it actually works well, as long as you aren't a stickler for intricate animation detail, you're going to have fun here, it runs smoother than a greased up jazz musician too, with a full 60 frames per second in both docked and handheld mode, making for a silky performance and the general feel that you're playing a high quality product, although it's slightly less silky smooth cut scenes and other close-up moments reveal that the character models are a good deal less detailed than their Xbox One and PlayStation 4 counterparts squint a bit during normal gameplay and you generally struggle to tell the difference. Then here is the counter quote from his video by Musen, he says, but when you're playing the game it actually works really well and it's easy to look past the graphical setbacks because whether you're playing in doctor undocked the game seems to run a consistent 60 frames per second which looks silky smooth and really leaves you feeling like you're having a true triple A home console experience, but on the console you can take with you on the go. However when you get up close and get a good look at some of the character models it's pretty clear they do have a good amount less detail than the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions do, but any imperfections are pretty much unnoticeable during gameplay. So this these examples are actually a little bit less damning in my opinion than the ones that happen when it's IGN, but clearly it looks like the structure and the general flow of of nintendo life's review and Musen's review is pretty similar. Similar enough especially in hindsight of what happened to IGN to kind of think that he read nintendo life's review reworded it and packaged it as his own. So this this kind of shows a pattern and did I talk about how much I hate this story? Because I really do, I don't want to dance on Philip here, like I hate, I don't know Philip, okay? I'm not like our GT85 Dreamcast guy, Spawnwave, who had him on the Spawncast and some of them knew him personally and had conversations behind closed doors. I'm not like that, I'm not connected, but I've I've been doing this for about 20 years, right? Since the age of 12 when I started up my own fan site all the way until now 32 years old I've been writing about and covering the video game industry whether it was Zelda, whether it was nintendo, for a while it was all of gaming I've been around the block, I've seen plagiarism, I've been editor-in-chief and had a team working under me and had to deal with you know fellow writers that might have plagiarized having to let them go and I've had to deal with other people plagiarizing our work and going through the process of contacting the right people over there to get things taken care of and it's a it's a very slippery slope. Plagiarism is bad and I feel at times for people doing things like for a moment I was actually feeling a little bad for Philip not just because he lost his job even though I fully and truly believe that was the only end result that that was going to occur here it's that for a little bit I almost felt like Philip did it because of the pressure he's under. We have learned from former IGN employee Alana Pierce who didn't you know leave on any bad terms at IGN she now works at Funhouse she just wanted to move on and do something different that's more to her taste. Someone posted on Twitter about what's tragic is that there's a million better writers with better more cutting takes in this industry and IGN chose to promote the one guy whose voice was harmless and generic because it turns out he had no voice at all says something about what where media is at and she responded to this kind of in a defensive IGN and a little bit for the hire of Philip and she goes I assure you this isn't how the hiring process works or how it happened for Philip they were pretty desperate to fill that role and had a huge amount of difficulty finding anyone there was someone with a bunch of experience they offered the job too but the salary was unfortunately too low so it's one of those things where they had someone in mind they wanted for the position but obviously IGN salary was well below their asking price and they probably were getting that you know maybe it might even well below what that person was making up their current outlet it's one of those things that finding someone who's qualified is difficult and so they reached into the youtube jar and drew out Philip who if you just glance at his youtube channel on the surface seemed like a decent and enough guy and I you know he might be a genuine decent guy but I've heard rumors that you know maybe he had to have an 80 hour work weeks that he's under a lot of intense pressure and all this stuff and maybe that's why he plagiarized right like coming up with excuses for ultimately what led to him making this terrible mistake and I get it I understand crunch I understand pressure I understand deadlines I understand working 80 hour weeks hell for a long time at Zeldin former I was pushing 120 hour weeks it got insane for a while I was barely sleeping but reality is that he did it and it's bad and now we have evidence that he might have done it before he was even hired back on his youtube channel before IGN suggesting that maybe he's even done this before and before when did he start plagiarizing now we don't know now we'd have to go back and look at every review he's ever done on his channel and check out every other review of that game and see if he's plagiarized again from anywhere else first Nintendo life now that we're aware of and now from from boomstick gaming it's it's obviously not something that I can point to and say definitively it was due to pressure at the company that he did it it certainly sounds like he might have already been doing it before and because he got away with it before he thought he could get away with it again and he should know better IGN is a much bigger outlet than his following on youtube they were not going to be fooled and there you go so to boomstick gaming first off I want to offer my congratulations this controversy has caused his channel to completely blow up by the time it's all said and done he's probably going to have more subscribers than we do his video on the plagiarism over 400 000 views I think his patreon has actually grown from zero backers to 21 now he is the big beneficiary here as he should be it was his work that was stolen and rightfully so he is now reaping pretty much all of the benefits from this whole event he has seen his channel grow by over 20 000 subscribers and growing or might be third heck he might hit 100 000 subscribers off of this controversy who knows especially if IGN decides to do the right thing and actually link to his youtube channel instead of just mentioning it because that's the sad thing is they put up an image like their their apology post is basically an image an image file off of their chat program that they use that they use slack and you could tell that if you actually look at the image itself so the unfortunate there's no url directly to the the youtuber and if they ever decide to do that as an apology be like hey you know when we re-review dead cells like at the top throw a brief mention um you know a big shout out or something like that that's going to cause his channel to grow even more so ultimately he has benefited and who knows maybe he's well on his way to making youtube a career this is just one event we'll have to see if all those 20 000 30 000 however many subs he ends up with um actually watches his content as he goes here because now he's got all the attention now he's got to keep it by creating quality content not that he wasn't creating quality content before but these people had never seen that content so they got it they got to now get a taste for what kind of youtuber he is and see if they want to stick around but i wish all the luck to you boomstick gaming i think uh you've got a good thing going and you know what we all need our our little nudge our little push and you got quite a big one um it's unfortunate that it had to come through plagiarism but hey you know more power to you you deserve all the success you're you're currently seeing and to ign thank you thank you from the bottom of my heart for doing the right thing i think i mean ign it really had no choice they had to let them go um but they didn't gloss over the blatant plagiarism here i heard so many comments arguing how well it's not definitive we don't really know ign is saying it happened it's pretty definitive the evidence was damning we didn't need ign to tell us the evidence was damning the evidence was damning in that of itself so yeah ign came to the correct conclusion they apologized to their fans they apologized to the youtuber um they let go of the of the writer they didn't put the writer's name uh in the post probably um as a way to try to curb some of the hate that writer's gonna end up getting he's already getting tons of it on twitter and everything and i don't want you guys running off twitter to beg on him reality is he has broken the trust of viewers on ign on his own channel uh he has his own reputation to deal with and repair and we have yet to see if he'll be able to do that i mean if you plagiarize this review we've plagiarized his fifa review um how do we know every piece of content on his channel isn't plagiarized i mentioned this before usually when someone plagiarizes and gets busted it's not the first time they've done it and now we have evidence that he's at least done it one other time uh but is that even the first time he did it has he done it in other reviews has he done it in other content has some of his top fives and top ten lists literally just copy paste from other other youtubers other smaller people i don't know but um he his own actions brings all of his content into question so ign thank you so much for doing the right thing this isn't gonna make all you guys out there like ign i know there's plenty of people who don't like them i've always had respect for ign uh it's very difficult to do what they do in the position they do covering all of gaming yeah we could talk about how maybe they should offer more money to the nintendo guy maybe they don't have that more money i don't know how ign's financials work out um and it's easy enough for us to say hey why don't you call up me here in nintendo raffle jans from nintendo prime and hire me to do it but um finding the right person is difficult i don't know that i would even be the right person right if they hired me do i want to uproot my family and go to california for 60 000 a year or whatever it is and uh knowing that that's basically minimum wage and scraping the bottom to try to survive though there with a family of five like no it's very difficult to find someone uh to do this it's easy enough to say pick any fan off the street with so many background checks and yeah they looked into philip and things slipped through the cracks um i don't know uh what's next i i i worry about the nintendo voice chat he could see was the host of it they're gonna have to address this on nintendo voice i don't know how they can if they try to just do the next nintendo voice chat and ignore that philip is gone um i i don't think that's appropriate i think they need to give another shout out to boomstick gaming and i think they need to um mention their disappointment and their hope that this becomes a learning and growing experience for philip in his future endeavors because i i surely surely hope it is i don't know how often he's plagiarized but this is the first time he got caught and i hope in getting caught um he realizes the error of his ways and become a better person in the future at whatever he does um i i hate this i hate the story so much i hate the story with a passion i all right i think i think that's gonna be it we we need to move on to some more positive stories moving forward hopefully i'll have something nice and big for big and juicy actually with a video i'm working on for later in the day on wednesday uh but until then enjoy this update and let me know your final thoughts on plagiarism your final thoughts on philip on ign boomstick gaming and how this whole situation played out uh what would have you done differently why do you think philip did it uh why do you think he's maybe done it in the past um what do you think this says about him as a person uh do you think this says anything at all let me know in the comments below all right folks i'm nathan irrefutable james from the tenor prime if you like the video you know what to do and if you dislike the video hit that dislike button subscribe for more content and i'll catch you in the next one