So I’m not one to shit toss at other gaming sites or gaming writers. I pretty much go about my business and do what I do. However, one massive exception has come up over the past few months and the time has come for the proverbial poo poo to be hurled. A shady website called perezstart.com has decided to take up its copy and paste skills and plagiarize the holy hell out of my gaming content as well as content from GameSpot.

Ian Cantello and his pals are literally copying and pasting any gaming content I publish, and are doing so with absurd responsiveness. For example, my latest review, featuring Yooka-Laylee, was posted on perezstart.com a matter of hours (April 5 at 4:16 p.m.) after I published it (April 5 at 9:04 a.m.). So you can see a sample of what I’m talking about, check out the screens below that highlight some of the shameless plagiarizing the site has done:

The original review on We Write Things I posted yesterday.
Perezstart.com’s control V post that went up hours later.

And it is not just my content that is being ripped by Ian and co. GameSpot’s articles are also being plagiarized. Check out a recent example of this below:

GameSpot’s original news post.
Perezstart’s follow-up copy and paste effort.

If you’re still not convinced of how shameless and ridiculous the copying and pasting goes, take a look at the screens from the end of my Yooka-Laylee review and their copying nonsense:

The ending from my review on We Write Things.
The ending portion of my review, copied onto Perezstart.com.

They even use the We Write Things plug I use at the end of each of my articles! Unreal. I guess we should feel good that the disclaimer about the review appearing first on our site is at least in there. But naw, not really.

We have reached out to those at the site to ask them to stop and they have not. In fact, their efforts have only increased. We tried using a plug-in to try and prevent the easy copying and pasting of content from our site, but that didn’t halt them.

When this first was happening, I sort of rolled my eyes at it, figuring this was just a product of covering the gaming industry for many years. I’ve worked on thousands of stories, reviewed the biggest games and interviewed some of the industry’s top developers and figure heads. Maybe it was just a temporary thing and it would go away. Well, it hasn’t.

Our site operates under the passion we have for the industries we write about, not money or any sort of revenue. I cover games because I love writing about them and enjoy telling people about how awesome they are. I’m also in the process of writing a trilogy of books, while working day in and day out and having that whole “personal life” thing somewhere in there too.

Quite frankly, I, and we, don’t have the time or the resources to go after perezstart.com, but the least I can do is make a mention of it so our readers know what has been happening. This is the last I’ll speak of this because there’s a lot of awesome gaming stories to write about, and hearing about things like this isn’t what you come here for. My friends and I appreciate the support of our growing audience and thank you for visiting us each day.

About Steve Ruygrok

Gaming, Spirits, and Craft Beer enthusiast. If you say you don't like beer, then you just haven't had the right type yet. Great spirits keep away the bad ones. Video games are kind of amazing, just do it...or something like that.

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