Edit: You may translate our articles into other languages, without reservation. Please link to the original article so people may check your translation.

Recently, Source Gaming has found some incredible popularity due to our timely translation of Sakurai’s Famitsu Columns, “Thoughts About the Video Games” and for our in-depth, always sourced research we provide. Before the new DLC being released for Smash for 3DS/Wii U, Source Gaming has surpassed 500,000 views. Today, I’d like to quickly discuss a potential issue we’ve noticed, the goals of Source Gaming, and how we will try to fix this particular issue.

There are some blogs and news outlets which have particularly enjoyed the work we’ve done—so much so that they have literally copied and pasted our articles for their own profit. In an extreme case, there was one blog that copied the entire translation of “The Art of Balancing” without even giving us credit in the one-or-two-sentence introduction. At the very least, you must give us credit AND provide a link to the original article. Blatant plagiarism is unacceptable, and Source Gaming will not stand for this uncredited copying anymore. Our articles and translations are written by fans, for fans.

We ourselves do not make a single penny from our articles and translations. The blog is hosted on the free version of WordPress, and the ads you may see creates revenue for WordPress only. If you are interested in donating to Source Gaming, please contact us below. We hope to move to our own servers in the near future, so we can have further control over the content. If we decide to run ads on our own domain, they will used to pay for the server and nothing more. Since we do not make any profit from our articles and translations, we will actively discourage businesses from profiting from our work—especially when they have never asked for permission. There are currently three sites which may post our content without any restrictions. I’ve listed these sites at the end of this article.

There is also the issue of name recognition, and promotion. When other news blogs post our full translation or articles, there is no reason for their readers to visit our blog. This creates a huge promotion issue, as people are unaware the Smash content they have been reading for the past six months is coming from us. Furthermore, our goal at Source Gaming is to enlighten our readers and encourage them not to accept anything as fact unless it is properly sourced (hence the name). We even provide the original Japanese text for users who would like to check our translations. While we do not post the full contents of Sakurai’s books, we will provide a transcription of the text for other fact-checkers upon request.

Furthermore, there is the potential issue that, as human beings, we may get something wrong. Posting a link to the article with a simple introduction—without including its full content—will allow us to amend the article in question and update it with new information. We have done this in the past with the Definitive Unused Character Article, which is being constantly updated as new information is discovered.

Lastly, copying and pasting someone’s work is incredibly lazy. I know many sites are rushing to be the first post out the door, but I’d like to encourage other writers AND readers to realize that the first article posted will most likely be the poorest article. This isn’t always the case, but it does happen often enough to warrant a discussion. With other bloggers rushing to get the next write up, they often skip basic fact-checking, unable to distinguish their opinion vs. fact and lack context. This is why there is so much misinformation in the media. Instead of taking the time to polish a piece of text, it’s much more profitable to put out a half-baked article. The best articles that used The Art of Balancing or The Creator’s Hands are Alive and Well were the ones that were posted days later, not the ones that were rushed. To paraphrase Miyamoto, a rushed article will be bad forever, but a delayed article may eventually become good. I’ve included some links below that I consider to be “excellent” uses of our content. For the bloggers that I have not listed, I’d encourage you to study these pieces.

In closing, if you—the reader—discover a blogger posting our work without our consent or basic accreditation, please raise the issue to both our team and the blogger in question. Together, we can improve the field of video game journalism!

Sites permitted to post Source Gaming’s work without reservation (with credit provided):

SmashBoards
Kantopia
The Tanooki

Some Examples of Good Articles:

“The Secrets of Smash Bros. Play Balance, from Masahiro Sakurai” – Gamasutra

“Roy is Announced for Super Smash Bros.” – NerdUnderground

“Super Smash Bros Director Calls DLC These Days a Scam” – MyNintendoNews

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us below:

Otherwise, please message me on Twitter, @PushDustIn.

-Source Gaming Team

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