IncGamers - Credit denied: The failure of videogame news sourcing.
We are occasional perpetrators and frequent victims of this here.
Eurogamer did some actual journalism and (like Videogamer, who ended up
with much the same quote)
contacted publishers SEGA for their take on the affair. What they
neglected to mention, however, is Videogamer’s original report that got this
story into the wider press in the first place. Eurogamer’s piece links only
to the 1csc.ru page, making it appear as if they just happened to be
independently reading Russian-language distribution sites a day after the
original story had spread, and then decided to ask SEGA about it. Possible.
But unlikely.
If it seems like I’m trying to single out specific sites here, that’s not
really the intent. Every gaming site in existence has been guilty of mis-crediting
sources (by accident or malicious design) at some point in the past.
IncGamers certainly isn’t immune. We’d made our share of mistakes.
But this stuff matters. It matters to readers, because if a site is
regularly failing to provide correct credit to sources it probably isn’t an
outlet you should be paying too much attention to. It suggests the writers
there are either overworked, sloppy or just don’t care. Every time it
happens, it validates the lack of trust readers place in games writing.