The email in the comments
these symbols seem to render very differently on different devices. i got a wheel of hatchets, an eight-pointed star, and two futhark runes on desktop.
…which is why it’s at the very least irresponsible for them to send something like this. if there is actually intent here that only makes it worse.
My favorite part was that GoG was told they cannot send this email in Germany because it would break the Nazi rule so they purposely get blocked their emails to getting to Germany.
In other words, they knew.
Developers: you can’t use unused Unicode to represent photos, such a simple string of Data could be interpreted an infinite different ways If there isn’t unity.
Marketing team: bah humbug, what’s the worst thing that could happen…
Do you happen to have your GOG account in Germany or in German language?
no, because then i apparently wouldn’t have gotten the email at all!
Living in Germany woth German account but somehow English newsletters I also got the email.
Sure there’s intent. Obviously!
You forgot to hide your name.
The screenshot is from the PCGamer article
MFW
I don’t have the email but I would assume those emojis in this case are Slavic neopaganist symbols, also known as rodnovery.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Rodnover_symbols
Notice there is no double sig in there. Also note that Rodnovery is a neopagan religion, associated with nationalism. It’s the Slavic equivalent the Norse pantheon fetishism you see in the West in the form of Odinism.
You should assume they’re Nazi symbols because they are, even if Nazis stole a lot of symbols from everyone else. The sig was first adapted into the double sig in 1929 to be used as the Schutzstaffel logo
“those emojis”
They’re not emojis, at all. Emojis are pictures with a very specific and limited set. They’re ascii characters.
You calling them emojis is “grandma calling your Xbox a “Nintendo Station”” level dumb.Those aren’t standard ASCII characters. They are Unicode. They are closer to emojis than anything else.
Before you try to lecture anyone you might want to spend more than 10 seconds on wikipedia next time.
There’s a multitude of ways to correct someone without coming off as a pedantic prick in the process
You really didn’t have to add dumb at the end there. We all make mistakes, and emoji can also be interpreted and implemented in pretty different ways
Thats it?
Gaben, “we aren’t a monopoly there’s plenty of other publishers to buy from”
GOG
Steam once again using the winning strategy of doing nothing while your opponent fucks up
interesting how easily is for a company to not shoot itself in the foot if they don’t have public shareholders
Gog is privately owned now though?
Yep, and that’s why it’s also a good platform resistant to enshitification.
the stock market is a cancer on the economy.
Where’s the game store footgun meme?
Crap, there’s a quote about doing that, I just can’t remember whether it was Technoblade, Sun Tzu or Emperor Rosselle who said it…
You mean the Napoleon Bonaparte one?
Never interrupt your enemy when he’s about to make a mistake
Ah, should’ve known it was some frenchie. Though, I’m pretty sure it was Emperor Rosselle in that case
People can shit on Valve all they want, but at least they never went full Nazi.
People defending this as “those are lighning bolts, not everyone knows it’s nazi imagery” are american, right?
Like, everyone in Europe knows this is strictly and unmistakably nazi imagery, especially in Poland. There is no wiggle room for not knowing; that’s not even an excuse GOG themselves are trying to make, because if they tried to use that excuse then literally no one with the ability to read it in Europe would be uneducated enough to fall for it.
People defending this as “those are lighning bolts, not everyone knows it’s nazi imagery” are american, right?
Nah, they know what they are. They’re trying to a) downplay the symbol’s significance and normalize displaying it and b) get a “snowflake got triggered by lightning bolts” own out of it.
I’m sure there are some fash doing this, but a lot of comments here seem extremely naive and forgiving. And they come from lib instances, which I have grievances with, just not regarding dogwhistling & normalizing fascism (unless it comes out of UA…)
Racists wil Fuck around and then plead ignorance to avoid Finding Out.
It was used in Poland as a symbol of feminism when women protested against criminalization of abortion.
This is why it became nazi imagery, declared and sanctioned by polish right-wing government because they needed an excuse to stop the movement.
You from america, friend?
European.
And you should tell those guys they stole their symbol from 21st century feminists:
I’m gonna need some proof of this. I wonder why a German, designing a sign for the German members of the SS in 1929 (10 years before Germany invaded Poland), would choose a sign with the purpose of harming a Polish feminist/pro-abortion movement.
It makes no sense and I can’t find any sources saying anything like that at all.
So cough up some sources. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
https://natemat.pl/324721,symbol-czerwonej-blyskawicy-co-oznacza-czerwony-piorun-na-strajku-kobiet
Article is in Polish, but I thing google translate or DeepL should work for you to get the gist. They picked this symbol as “lightning”
One lightning bolt by itself is a very different meaning to 2 right next to each other.
Especially so when next to a Black Sun
Double lightning bolt is unmistakably a nazi symbol.
The black sun alone is a Nazi symbol. Invented by Heinrich Himmler himself and used as decoration for their SS Ordensburg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_(symbol)?wprov=sfti1#Wewelsburg_mosaic_and_the_Nazi_periodYeah, but also the red lightning bolt sign of the polish pro-abortion movement was introduced in 2016. The SS sign with the sigrune was introduced in 1929.
If nazis had time travel, how did they manage to screw their war effort up so badly? They must have been even worse tacticians than we thought!
On that I cannot disagree. All I wanted to defend was a singular lightning bolt.
Yeah, that article is about how the media deliberately misinterpreted the symbol as being nazi-like after the feminist movement picked it after the war and after the Nazis used their famous double lightning insignia.
This sort of contradicts your first comment … If I’m being kind I think you were just being inarticulate.
Dude, you got the timeline completely wrong: https://www.obieg.pl/en/210-the-red-lightning-of-all-poland-women-s-strike-forwards-and-backwards
The red lightning sign as part of the polish pro-abortion movement came into existence in 2016! A whopping 87 years AFTER the Nazis created the SS sign.
If the Nazis made the sign to discredit poland’s pro-abortion movement, they would have needed time travel to do so.
WTF I just learned about this.
This is the top of the email:
This is the typeset of the game they’re promoting:
This looks like a monumentally stupid fuckup. Never attribute to malice that what can be easily attributed to stupidity, incompetence, or negligence.
They knew the sig “runes” were problematic before sending out the email, as they said they removed them for their German customers, but then kept it for everyone else. They knew, but decided to keep of in anyway.
ffs, why must everything good turn out to be shit. well, gog hasnt been THAT good, but it has been nice extra thing. knowing companies cant do anything without having at least 6 meetings about it, there is no way this went unnoticed by people there, so i rule out rogue actor doing this.
I’m sorry, not with the fucking double sig rune. You can’t be that brain dead to not see and know it is the symbol of the fucking SS and then even try to dance around German laws against the usage of NS-symbols and even fuck that up.
I do kind of like the fact that it’s in Unicode though. So things like this are actually possible. Sort of weird decision really.
This is really the whole incident is more than the sum of it’s parts stuff, but in a negative way.
“Found my grandpa’s helmet. He must’ve been an electrician or something.”
I see what you mean
had they used 1 or 3 of the symbol instead, I don’t think we’d have this problem
Ofc GOG became bad after They started requiring devs to use AI tools for the GOG Galaxy client.
Context?
Epic use of Epic Rap Battles clip
Good Old
GamesGoebbelsThe transphobic company is also a nazi company.
I am shocked, shocked I say.
transohobic company
Yo imma need some blue text about that
I got the email three days ago here in America, I didn’t look at it at the time. I dunno if Gmail can edit an email after I’ve received it, I suppose they can. Here’s how it rendered just now when I opened it. I’m not defending anything, I just wanted to show what I found::
In not linking reddit, which has way more details about how it went about.
https://www.theverge.com/games/945088/gog-apologizes-email-nazi-symbols-the-end-of-the-sun
In email marketing, you typically send emails in batches. Sometimes for A/B testing, other times to avoid spam catchers/overloading the system. Or sometimes for geo location purposes (like everyone gets the email at 8am, so it batches it to time zone)
The GoG reps said they sent it to a small batch and after the call out, stop the email sends and fixed it.
Ditto here. If I’d seen it in my own inbox I’d be sending some choice words their way
Don’t let that stop you.
This is messed up, as a contributor to their Patreon to preserve games, I wrote some pretty harsh words.
Stupid marketing fuckup. Still it’s my preferred store because no DRM.
If no one gets fired over this, then it’s not a marketing fuckup. It just means they don’t mind nazis there.
Why must someone get fired? If this is a mistake, I’m perfectly fine with that person getting yelled at.
Because there is no way
ϟϟwas sent by mistake. This is a character combination that has one use. And is irrelevant to slavic history. And they accompanied it with a kolovrat. This is the guy who invented the kolovrat as a pseudo slavic neopagan symbol. If it was just oneϟit would be iffy at best, but you know, benefit of the doubt, maybe they copy-pasted a random selection from some random neopagan website. This is the specific combination that has one (1) known use.The kolovrat alone reeks of neonazism, the
ϟϟis exclusively a nazi symbol, there is no wiggle room
They have a good solution against DRM.
