IGN has taken the steps to remove “pretty much everything” posted by the site’s ex-editor Filip Miucin, with the controversy surrounding Miucin’s plagiarism of a YouTuber’s Dead Cells review causing the media company to delete more articles posted under his name. This comes after more accusations of plagiarism were leveled at Miucin, including evidence of him copying a NeoGAF post word-for-word.
In a now-deleted response video, Miucin had called his plagiarism of Boomstick Gaming’s Dead Cells review “not intentional,” encouraging viewers to look for further examples of him plagiarizing other writers’ work. Unfortunately for Miucin, this callout has resulted in the evidence stacking up against him, to the point where IGN is now scrubbing the majority of his work from the site.
In a post to the ResetEra forum, IGN Editorial Manager Justin Davis said that the “likely outcome” would be all of Miucin’s work being removed from the site.
“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,” David wrote. “We are moving on it as fast as we can as a Senior Editorial staff.”
While many of Miucin’s posts still remain on the site, David explained that there are “complications” when it comes to removing a writer’s work wholesale, including replacing the reviews posted under his name. “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,” Davis concluded.
Other IGN staff members have also spoken up about the fallout from Miucin’s actions. When pointed in the direction of a ResetEra post that included evidence of Miucin’s Octopath Traveler review plagiarizing Polygon’s, Executive Editor of Reviews Dan Stapleton tweeted: “FYI, we’ve seen enough now, both from the thread and our own searches, that we’re taking down pretty much everything he did. It’s a process, but you’ll start seeing stuff come down tonight.”
IGN Producer Brian Altano, who appeared alongside Miucin on the Nintendo Voice Chat podcast, wrote: “most video game websites don’t really have practices in place to stop plagiarism because hiring people who love to write and talk about video games from their own personal perspective is the whole fucking point.”
Altano concluded: “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.”
Some thoughts about recent events at IGN involving a former staffer who was fired for plagiarism. Also, sorry I curse so much. pic.twitter.com/Hq9GUn15xN
— Brian Altano (@agentbizzle) August 15, 2018
While Miucin responded to his firing from IGN on his YouTube channel, he has yet to address this latest batch of accusations. He has expressed a desire to continue working in the games industry, though hasn’t posted any further content to his independent YouTube channel since deleting his response video.
