my video "Celeste, Germinal, & Videogame Plagiarism" is now back up on YouTube!

this is a short video essay i wrote and produced in 2022 on the topic of an upcoming indie game called Germinal, which appeared to be copying Celeste down to the very pixel in some cases. the video initially did very well and i never stopped standing behind it, but eventually the developers of Germinal found out and started acting like poor little meow meows in the comments, and i started receiving heaps of what i found to be disingenuous comments that totally missed the points i was trying to make. i ended up taking the video down because this got to me and i didn't feel like replying to every single comment individually.

considering the strongest contender for YouTube video of the year is now all about how plagiarism is plagiarism and how changing some details so it doesn't count as plagiarism is still plagiarism, i feel confident in putting this video back online. those are the aspects people completely omitted when they went and criticized my video.

like... that's not the point i was trying to get across? this would never be a weird thing on its own. but when you're also copying screen transitions and wipes and sprite animations down to the fucking pixel, doesn't that make something as basic as a few similarly shaped UI elements seem highly suspicious too? i would have never thought anything about that mundane level of plagiarism without seeing the blatant displays of it elsewhere in the game.

the whole point of this video was to make a distinction between derivativeness and actual plagiarism. the Super Mario Bros example was already directly mentioned in the video; ofcourse not every 2d platformer is a Mario ripoff, if anything it's just derivative, and that is a good thing. games can exist that are derivative, that are inspired by other people's design choices, without copying 300 of those design choices at once. at that point, you are committing plagiarism while using "i was just inspired by Celeste's art style" as an excuse.

would it not seem more logical that they just gave the player a poorly implemented mechanic as an alternative to ripping off the dash, just to make it appear less like plagiarism? the intent is obviously still the same, but they're trying to shield themselves from being a total ripoff by changing things up.

but as we've now all seen, changing things up slightly so people won't notice the difference does not mean it's not plagiarism. if plagiarism worked like that, then literally none of the people discussed in the hbomb video would have committed plagiarism. if plagiarism worked like that, all their "based on" "inspired by" "with the help of" "[pastebin full of sources]" excuses would hold up; and we all know very well that they clearly do not hold up, and that their works still cause harm to others through plagiarism regardless.

Germinal went so far in its similarities at the time that some people even argued they might have been stealing code from Celeste to achieve the same results. that's how far this goes. you don't end up at such a level of similarity if you're just being inspired, if you're just being derivative and coming up with new ideas of your own. you only end up there if you're engaging in plagiarism.

anyways, i think their practices still deserve to be called out, i think this video deserves to be publicly available again. hopefully people can now have a better, more mature discussion about this topic.