The email in the comments
I see what you mean
had they used 1 or 3 of the symbol instead, I don’t think we’d have this problem
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.
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.
They have lots of controversial symbols. The male pregnancy emoji pales in comparison to an actual swastika. Clockwise, counterclockwise, with dots and without.
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.
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
This is really the whole incident is more than the sum of it’s parts stuff, but in a negative way.
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.
Is this in connection to the Colombian president’s post?
People can shit on Valve all they want, but at least they never went full Nazi.
Steam: “Suck my robot balls”
People really tearing GoG to shreds here but I don’t really understand why. I’m not a GoG user/stan so I don’t have a dog in this race, but this doesn’t (to me) seem to follow any pattern of malicious behavior.
- To my knowledge they haven’t had recurring big controversies of this kind that show systematic cultural issues. Their Wikipedia page has a “Controversies” section with 3 events, including this one, for a total of 9 sentences.
- Even if it was sent maliciously and intentionally, if they apologize and it doesn’t happen again I’m not going to get bent out of shape. These email campaigns are run by peons low on the totem pole and hardly get any thorough review.
- The SS symbol is relatively niche and bland (though I concede this differs by country). To my knowledge it’s not the most common dogwhistle or exceedingly controversial. I’ve often seen people gaff into it when trying to punch up text with lighting bolts ⚡. It’s not exactly on the same tier as the death’s head => concentration camp connection.
- Building on the above and knowing that GoG uses ai, its plausible that it could be accidental
- An intern gets some copy, runs the header through Ai like he usually does because emojis in headers perform way better.
- The LLM looking for “runes” has a strong bias for pairs of the symbol; probably nobody writes Elder Futhark runes, and especially that one, outside of the SS context.
- Even if the intern knows the symbol, not all systems render it in an obvious way.
- The email service automatically filters it from German emails due to stricter laws on Nazi symbols.
I’m not saying people can’t choose to believe it was malicious or that it’s impossible for GoG to have a rotten company culture. But I’m confused at the level of vitriol. You’d think we were talking about tobacco or oil companies with an established history of killing puppies.
One of the main issues with all that is that there was a review, and they didn’t sent it to Germany because of that review. So no, it was known, it is not a niche dog whistle, and I for one am not blaming the intern (if any) who did it, but rather the moderator who allowed the letter to go
Yeah the final responsibility is entirely on whoever owns the email campaign/process. Having read their response to the community, it was more tone deaf and confusing than just delaying a statement or making a more focused one.
At the end of the day they did stop the email mid send-out and are allegedly doing a review, which is the most you could ask of the higher ups. I’ve been through similar fires (though not Nazi or PR related) at some companies, figuring out exactly who said what and when can be very tricky. They probably don’t yet know how strong the feedback was, when it was given or who might be lying to save their job.
Immediately putting out specifics like “we didn’t port the feedback” is a terrible idea. The public has even less context, not knowing how siloed the review process is or if logistics played a factor (German review came last, reviewer was in a different timezone, etc…).
Whole process has been bungled all around.
I much prefer the gog approach as a video game platform in a huge way. I would like to see this approach of selling games win.
But they fucked up so massively here… Accidental or not, the iconography of the twin lightning bolts in an international context is so clear.
They need to make their apology so loud and so clear, that any little nazlets thinking this is a sign from someone on gog staff, instead realize that there is no safe space for their hatred there.
You cannot be ambivalent to maybe being associated with Nazis in the minds of some people. That’s how you get Nazis.
They ran the ss symbol - except for the campaign in Germany where nazi symbolism is illegal - so they knew what it was and ran it anyway
People responded to this going “hey dude wtf” and the official response has been…not smart
And now it is blowing up
I don’t get all this noise too, being nazi is finally cool again! Those woke lefties want to break all good things again…
Even if it was sent maliciously and intentionally, if they apologize and it doesn’t happen again I’m not going to get bent out of shape. These email campaigns are run by peons low on the totem pole and hardly get any thorough review.
It is not run by peons. Email marketing is a major source of revenue for companies. It’s one of the main pillars of communication that’s directly to actual engaged customers.
At my job, the ad copywriters, the PR team and the email marketers control all messaging of the brand. Everyone else (the website content team, the social media team, etc) goes to them for validation and content checks. It’s a big deal.
The SS symbol is not a dogwhistle. Dogwhistles are meant to be covert and unassuming to anyone except those within the neofascist subculture, like 1488 and triple parenthesis.
Unlike those dogwhistles, meant only to be understood by an ingoup, the SS lighning bolts are as explicit as a swastika. I would go even as far as to say that they are more egregious than a swastika, as swastikas have cultural signification in some countries that might muddy the waters when interpreting the symbol alone. The SS bolts have no such excuse.
Also it wasn’t an automatic filter on german emails, it was a filter on german speakers. German emails configured with english as their language did receive the email, according to comments here.
There is no benefit of the doubt to be allowed here. If they don’t have an extremely solid explanation (and LLMs aren’t that, they know how to recognize actual dogwhistles, they wouldn’t output actual 1940s nazis imagery so famous & standard, unless instructed to), then either someone needs to be fired, or we as the public need to understand that there is complacency for actual nazism within this company.
Again, this isn’t some little dogwhistle people might be confused about. This is standard 1940s nazi imagery, on the same level of significance as the swastika. I knew this as a child in the 2000s, as a kid who never paid attention in class and found history to be the most boring topic.
I think it was just someone using that symbol thinking it was an innocuous Nazi reference, not understanding that it holds nearly as much significance as the Swastika itself to some people.
PR Firms and marketing departments aren’t especially bright, so they need to understand that there has been a tightening of perception on that front, and ANY Nazi imagery is considered inappropriate for marketing purposes.
I don’t think it was malicious but it’s still a big gaffe, especially coming from Poland, of all countries.
Ofc GOG became bad after They started requiring devs to use AI tools for the GOG Galaxy client.
The transphobic company is also a nazi company.
I am shocked, shocked I say.
transohobic company
Yo imma need some blue text about that
pretty certain itwas mostly a font rendering fuck-up. that being said, the should have diyched the symbols altogether.
The “GOG Bad Now” people in this thread are out of their minds.
This was overwhelmingly obviously some combination of poor decision and mistake with no malicious intent behind it.
Yes, it was a fuck up. Yes, they should apologize. No, this should not be a brand-ruining event for GOG.
If there was any history in their past for them to suggest they were facists or nazi sympathizers, this might be a different story.
Their response admitted that they did not send the same email to their German customers as they knew if would be offensive.
So why send it to everyone else in the world who is also offended by nazis? And why send those two runes side by side? There’s only one meaning in that choice. Both decisions show intent, not a little mistake.
Saying it was a mistake or a poor decision ignored the several points where people could have (should have) stopped the email from going out.
Stupid marketing fuckup. Still it’s my preferred store because no DRM.
Is 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
Fucking calm your this lmao. It’s aascii character, it can’t hurt you
It’s Unicode so it can hurt him!
The NON BREAKING ZERO WIDTH SPACE character is directly adjacent to the FEELING OF BEING STRUCK IN THE FACE BY A BASKETBALL WHEN YOU WERE NOT EXPECTING IT character. I really wish they had left the fifth circle of Hell out of the Unicode standard :/
They were ascii characters in a very peculiar order.
i was told words cannot hurt you
Fuck nazis and fuck you
I’m pretty sure the email refers to slavic stuff, not nazis
The two SS bolts are ostensibly nazi imagery, there is no way anyone who went to school in Europe in the apst century doesn’t know that. Also they skipped sending sending the email to users with German as their GOG language; they knew exactly what they were doing.
It was the fucking logo for the SS
looks like slavic rune to me, im not in this debate, but is there any proof of the higher ups as Nazi, or are you guys just doing this out of fun?
It’s not proof that the higher ups are nazis, but it is literally the logo for the SS, not just some generic slavic runes.
Fucking calm your this lmao. It’s aascii character, it can’t hurt you
The phrase “I don’t believe your ethnic group has a right to live” is also just a bunch or ascii, but do you see how that’s a fucked up thing to send to your customers?
