Well that’s a headline I never thought I’ll write. Several posts and comments on the GOG subreddit have noticed a promotional e-mail that contains some… interesting symbols, which I can confirm with my own e-mail. As can be seen from the screenshot below, an e-mail containing a discount code for the game The End of the Sun (nothing out of the ordinary so far) contains 4 symbols that resemble Nazi iconography.
Comments have gone off the rails.
Locking this down
Was willing to buy the “oopsie daisy! The symbols displayed incorrectly” defence, but admitting that they KNEW the issue existed, put two of them side by side, and then doubled down by basically saying “one bad egg shouldn’t spoil a perfectly good rune”, then not sending the offending email to German customers is baffling!
Time to demand a few refunds I think. Can’t support any justification for promoting fascism.
The “not sending to German customers” is the cincher to me.
So they knew it was there and decided not to send it to the market where it would be possibly illegal. This is pretty brazen and I cannot imagine what they are thinking would come from this that would make the reputational impact worthwhile.
Surprising amount of people here seem to believe the PR bullshit non-apology. You probably think Musk just did a Roman salute too. Pathetic.
Good to know most people have a brain and are capable of critical thinking to easily see through the bullshit.
After nearly two decades working in IT companies, I can see how someone could discover this issue and notify someone else, but it was never properly escalated and addressed due to ineffective internal organization. I don’t mean to defend them, but I don’t see any reasonable explanation for why they would have done this intentionally.
They didn’t use the The Schutzstaffel Nazi symbol in the German mailers because they thought it would violate hate speech laws.
There was no reason to use 2 of those runes together.
They didn’t use the The Schutzstaffel Nazi symbol in the German mailers because they thought it would violate hate speech laws.
That doesn’t contradict what I wrote, though. I can see how some manager who didn’t care enough or didn’t understand the implications would accept this half‑assed measure somebody suggested on slack.
I mean, they should be criticized and shamed for what’s happened, but I see no evidence of malicious intent.
Sadly, that’s the point of dog whistling, to have some doubt to whether it was actually innocent.
With how prevalent dog whistles are in neo-Nazism, it’s not surprising that people are sceptical. It’s a whole thing to send “subtle” Nazi symbology and then deny everything when called out.
It looks pretty intentional from where I’m standing. At best the shot caller was apathetic to it looking like actual Nazi iconography to some recipients.
After four decades of life on this planet, I can think of a million reasons why this was done intentionally. Maybe you just arent that smart?
This needs to be properly adressed and whoever did this and whoever greenlighted it should the full feel consequences.
All that being said I can not see this being a company wide intention. Just from a business point of view this is so stupid that it beggars believe. Even if the entire company are neo nazis they would know that openly espousing those ideas would result in losing customers and losing partners.
The big game publishers would not want to be associated with Nazis at least publicly so they might pull games from GoG to stop the reputational damage. Anyone that has at least a functioning brain would stop buying from them until there is a full explenation and proper resolution.
And considering GoG barely keeps their head above water, they can not afford this at all. Unless the new owner wants to tank the company and sell off the assets.
The fact the game has changed logo and gog decided they’d include the old one stinks.
This makes the runes in the gog mail feel like a reaction to the devs “going back” on their original iconography and an attempt at fixing it.
“Oh, you changed your symbol because it was too nazi-like? Let us double down on it.”
Any publicity is good publicity, I guess.
Game looks quite good. No evidence of any Nazi related stuff in the gameplay, Steam forums etc. That seems entirely to be GOG’s doing
Might buy it at on Steam at 45% off as part of their “women-led games” sale.
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What’s the game btw
Just think they’re ukrainian, then it’s OK
where are all the people that were attacking valve yesterday? c’mon guys! GOG is the best, right??
But on GOG, you actually own your games! Well, you don’t, but you can download the files and run the game without the launcher! Well, you also can on Steam and EGS, but… uhhh… whatever, Valve is a monopoly, this is why you should buy from GOG and not any other major competitor to the monopoly like EGS, Ubisoft Connect, BattleNet, itch, Xbox Store, Amazon…
GOG is a meme service, and its fanboys are even more annoying than Valve’s simply because their platform of choice is objectively worse. At least no one defends EGS or Ubisoft Connect.
I for one complain about both platforms for subtly different reasons!
Now I’ve got one more with gog, I guess.
Other than the rare direct purchase, where are folks getting their games anyway? Zoomplatform??
I got that email. Symbols verbatim
𖥞 ꥟ ϟϟ
Let’s look those up.
-
BAMUM LETTER PHASE-D MVOP
not a germanic rune
-
REJANG SECTION MARK
not a germanic rune
-
GREEK SMALL LETTER KOPPA
not a germanic rune
0/3 germanic/nazi runes. They resemble if you willfully go there.
verdict: reaction bait for reddit-grade pearl clutchers
This explanation falls apart when it comes to the SS symbol.
Gog claims that they were using the sowilo rune, but as you found they were using the lower case koppa letter. The sowilo rune is included in unicode, there was no reason to use the greek letter koppa for it … unless they wanted to hint at something else. And the elephant in the room: why did they put 2 of the things next to eachother? Gog hasn’t found a suitable excuse for that so far.
It’s an obvious dog whistle and it’s rightfully being called out.
Then why bother removing them for Germany
A straight line isn’t a Nazi symbol either, but if you put 8 of them together in to a pinwheel shape, well now we have a problem.
Context matters.
This has to be satire. You’re doing satire, right?
No, its bait.
just look at these two innocent numbers
- 14 a factor of 7 and 2
- 88 a factor of 11 and 23
Still think there is any malicious intent here??
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I also recognize that placing two such runes next to each other could create an unfortunate association with symbols used by the Nazi regime. This was noticed before distribution, and out of respect for local sensitivities, the material was not sent to the German community.
Zero explanation for why there were two of them, and the thing about Germany makes them look worse.
But it’s not the same symbol despite being two of them.
Let’s not nazis hijack the letter S and fucking sun now shall we? This is so tiring.
As much as I would like to not let Nazis hijack certain things, the simple fact is they did, they have, and they continue to. If Nazi-ism were gone and a distant memory, which perhaps even a decade ago I might’ve believed we were nearly at, then we can start working on reclaiming what they have polluted and bringing back its true, full history.
But that has all changed, the masks are coming off and we are starting to see how far these white supremacists have metastasized and how much power they are beginning to take control of with their fascism. Now is not the time to begin trying to reclaim these symbols, precisely when they are actively using them as dogwhistles and trial balloons, actively spreading their vile ideology and starting to signal to and coordinate with each other to make their ever-so-predictable moves against humanity once again.
And they decided to remove them specifically for Germany because…?
It’s also not even correct. I am in Germany, with a German (but English-language) GOG account and I received the email with those symbols. Someone should get fired over this.
Yo wtf that’s mens rea / admission of guilt
They just admitted they knew it was bad and were like “but it’s legal in the US so it’s fine to send it there” but ignore it’s about as bad as it gets for legal symbols.
First of all I love GOG, I love their mission, and I have stood by them since the beginning.
That being said, why the living fuck did they put 2 of the last symbol? What did that represent!?
to me it’s pretty clear that it was intentional. like ffs, they explicitly chose to send the email with that title everywhere except germany because it’s illegal to have nazi symbolism there. so obviously they knew! they realized what this came across as!
idk if it’s an edgy representative, and now they’re defending that rep or something (or maybe the rep is the one writing the shitty non-apologies)… but yea, i’m downloading all my offline installers and if they don’t have a real apology and commitment to not fucking do this again then my account is gone.
fuck gog. the ai shit was bad enough, this is fucking unacceptable. i’d rather put up with steam’s drm than give money to neonazis.
As an Easterner, I fully agree with that highlighted comment from Polish dude - the symbol you see in the title has nothing to do with Nazis, it is cultural heritage that we still use around.
For us it’s different, but idea is the same - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugunskrusts
Better don’t go to India
Let me remind you that this is Polish game and GoG is owned by a Polish company.
EDIT: I… don’t honestly understand the downvotes. Do you like not believe me and Wikipedia?
EDIT2: I’m assuming people somehow assumed I’m talking about runes, when in reality I just wanted to elaborate on local cultural heritage (the sun-looking thing in the game’s logo, not emails)
You still use them around because you have fucking nazis going around. Poland is the ONLY country REQUESTING the military base from the Burger Reich. Makes you think eh, what would they possibly have in common? 🤔🤔🤔
Trust me when I say this - many of the folks don’t even really understand Nazis. The symbols have nothing to do with them, it’s deeply enriched in our cultural heritage way before Nazis stole the symbols. One of the most respectable/known things from history in my country is “Order of Lāčplēsis”. Look it up, notice the dates, and then look up when Latvia was founded. The people who held the title were also involved in fighting against Nazis.
This is all verifiable online. Sometimes the East European history and culture is not what you can assume from GoG emails. We very much hate nazis as they literally brought us into wars and occupations, just like we can assume Poles are not very happy about Nazis attacking them and wrecking their country for decades.
You know what’s really annoying? That we essentially get hated for our cultural heritage because the baddies stole a symbol
Let me remind you that Nazis saw slavs as subhumans, next in line after Jews. Poles and Latvians are slavs
I just want to let you know that on my app you are labelled as Zionist (the coincidence in life eh), as such I have no respect for you or your opinions. With your respectable/known orders and history I wipe my ass and what GOG put was Nazi symbology. :)
Huh? I’m like at the opposite world of Israel and you can probably scan my comments for that stuff, doubt you’ll find me showing much support for a genocide.
EDIT: Actually, read my profile bio. It might have been due to questioning the numbers from early Lemmy days, but that’s pretty much history and in no way makes me a zionist, but someone who critically sees information that’s hard to believe and I usually need more proof than a reddit/lemmy comment.
It took me literally 2 minutes. Ah yes, you are a critical inspector of facts, yes. Would you like me to show you israeli scum RAPING inmates and civilians defending them? Or kids sniped? Or burned? Or Israeli stats on the war? Or hospitals/refugee camps/schools being bombs with thermobaric bombs?
let me know mr. “you don’t know what Nazi is”.
The Schutzstaffel is purely a Nazi symbol.
There was no reason to use 2 of those runes together, especially when not using it in German mailers because they thought it would violate hate speech laws.
What about the ss runes? Got a rationalization for that?
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Did you also stand by them when they started using AI images in the store? Or when they started that patrons thing where they just ask you to donate to a for-profit store?
GOG has been kind of weird lately, and I can’t say I like what I’ve been seeing.
Aw maaan. I saw some of these and managed to overlook them separately, but taken together it’s not looking great. That sucks, I liked GOG.
The second yes, the first no. I can see a patreon type thing for game preservation being a good thing so long as they maintain a paper trail. You’re not wrong though.
The two together at the end is the ss lightning bolt. Hitlers gestapo.
Yeah, I get that. But my point is, if they say it’s not supposed to have been that, when that’s what everyone else sees, what were they trying to represent? Like, ok, Nordic runes are touchy because of the nazis, but there are plenty of reasons to use them. But using that rune twice? Why? Why only that rune? How can you say you didn’t mean that? What else could you have been trying to represent?
A nitpick but the Gestapo were just a part of the SS.
The two main constituent groups were the Allgemeine SS (General SS) and Waffen-SS (Armed SS). The Allgemeine SS was responsible for enforcing the racial policy of Nazi Germany and general policing, whereas the Waffen-SS consisted of the combat units of the SS, with a sworn allegiance to Hitler. A third component of the SS, the SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV; “Death’s Head Units”[2]), ran the concentration camps and extermination camps. Additional subdivisions of the SS included the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) organisations. They were tasked with detecting actual or potential enemies of Nazi Germany, neutralizing the opposition, policing the German people for their commitment to Nazi ideology and providing domestic and foreign intelligence.
The twin suns of tatooine?
