Whoops. Lol, in this day and age where information is so easily and readily accessible, did he really think this would go unnoticed?

In the adult world it's actually far worse.  Imagine if the New York Times just copied an article written by a blogger or a big-name director copied the plot and structure of a Youtube fan-film.  If he's not suing that's already taking it better than most people.

OK, OK. Everyone here is right on reflection, it's pretty bad.

Yes, I'm a freelancer. I'm getting paid by the word to be exact.

Of course I wouldn't know how much someone at IGN earns. But I doubt it's too much. I had an internship at a german magazine (Gamestar) some years ago and the people there really didn't earn that much. I doubt it's different in the US or wherever. At the end of the day, gaming media is a pretty small niche, so there's not too much money to be made, I'm afraid. It's still fun though and money isn't everything, so don't get me wrong here.

just when I thought IGN couldn't get any sadder lol

Interesting. What's it take to freelance? Do you need some sort of background or can anyone just write something up and sell it assuming the piece is good?

IGN has officially fired him:

He wasn't just a typical reviewer for IGN either, they're going to need hire a whole new Nintendo editor for IGN which also includes hosting NVC.

You don't need any kind of special education. Before I became an author, I got an education as a cook and was flippin' burgers at Mc Donald's. I just decided that I need another job and I couldn't be bothered to do yet another education. So I just started to write for free for smaller websites and local newspapers. I sent them some articles which I thought would fit and asked them to publish it. It took quite a while until the first article got published. When I got like a dozen articles published with my name on it, I used that as a reference to find paid work. There are portals where companies acitvely search for freelance authors. That's where I found my first paid orders. Payment was shit, often less than one cent per word. But I stuck to it and published more and more articles.

With the time, my articles got the attention of bigger companies and they asked me to do orders for them. Over the years it got to a point where I don't even need to look for orders anymore. Instead I have to constantly turn some of them down because I am just not able to write them all by myself. I was even thinking about hiring a second author. But I'm a little bit scared of all that taxes and social insurance stuff. Whatever, today I got quite a lot of articles published and even wrote cover stories for magazines and whatnot.

When it comes to gaming, the initiative came from my end. I actively searched for work in that regard because it was kinda like a childhood dream for me to become a gaming journalist. Getting those jobs was easy as I had quite a lot of articles published by then. It also helped to get the internship at Gamestar. But when I discovered just how little you earn there, I decided that it will stay a thing on the side for me. It would be ok if I would still be in my 20s, but today I have a wife and a son so I need myself some more munniez. 

But yeah, all you need is a good writing style and you can be successful as an author even without having studied journalism or something. And please don't take my posts here as a reference. My english is often horrible, I am way better at writing in german. I really need to improve in that regard, because when I can write professional articles in english, that would open up a whole lot of new opportunities for me! ^^

Every time IGN fucks up an angel gets it's wings.

Now tell that to the OP in that other thread about following your dreams.