NicheGamer Caught Plagiarizing from Gematsu Once Again

While this news is not our standard vein of coverage, we decided covering it was best for the sake of highlighting cases of wrongful action in our industry.

The owner of the prominent gaming outlet Gematsu, Sal Romano, who I’m sure many, if not most of our readers, are aware of and frequent for coverage primarily related to Japanese gaming, made a Twitter thread discussing how another outlet, NicheGamer, has been plagiarizing his articles.

In this thread, Sal explains how aside from copy-pasting his wording, including instances of erroneous information, Niche Gamer’s articles appallingly insert auto-generated Gematsu page links which act as avenues for similar umbrellas of coverage on that website, not NicheGamer’s.

However, this is far from the first time NicheGamer has been outed for such practices. In December 2019, the website’s founder, owner, and former Editor-in-Chief, Brandon Orselli, published an apology post that also resulted from allegations of plagiarizing from Gematsu. Unfortunately, it appears that much-needed changes have not been made in the roughly three years since.

Before initially owning up to this content theft, the site stated that a ghostwriter was responsible. But, of course, such claims are essentially confirmed false by now due to these actions still occurring.

While this following point is us merely making inferences, NicheGamer’s almost humorously excessive plagiarism potentially implies that they are either not getting sent press releases by companies or they are and are blatantly ignoring them for whatever reason. If it’s the former, they should know that GamesPress is a viable source in several cases.

Regarding game coverage and any other type of journalism really, sourcing where you discovered your article contents, if it’s from another outlet, is paramount for building trust and transparency with one’s growing community and other sites as a whole. Even when considering the constant competition between every gaming news site, I doubt antagonism is ever anyone’s intention.

Getting news out quickly is an obvious priority, but doing so at the cost of integrity will always catch up to you and irreparably harm your image. There is nothing worth that inestimable compromise.

As for readers, visiting websites you know are trustworthy and reputable and ignoring those that don’t significantly bolsters the quality and reach of those who deserve it. Sal performs invaluable work for our industry, such as Japanese-to-English translations that we highly appreciate, and seeing it wrongly utilized mitigates his efforts.