GOG has apologized for a “Slavic adventure” newsletter sent out today that featured a number of very distinct Nazi runes in its subject line.
To be clear, this is not a misunderstanding, or images that look kind of alike, or a misinterpretation of an ambiguous situation: That’s a Sonnenrad, a kolovrat, and the extremely unmistakable double Siegrune of the SS—quite possibly second only to the swastika as the most distinctive emblem of the Nazi regime. From my own email:
This is not a small mistake. As PC Gamer’s Kara Philips put it, “There’s messing up, and then there’s whatever this is.” So, the obvious question: how the hell did this happen?
“We are sorry for today’s newsletter,” GOG wrote in an apology on X. “We made a series of mistakes: We created an unfortunate visual association by placing the runes incorrectly, we used the wrong logo for The End of the Sun, we did not check the display of the newsletter on mobile devices—which came out worse—and we didn’t port the feedback from our German QA to other languages.”
The apology doesn’t substantially address how the symbols wound up in the email in the first place. The problem with the runes isn’t their placement, it’s that they are explicitly and indelibly associated with Nazis and white supremacists. Just as with the swastika, their meaning prior to the Third Reich is irrelevant: The Nazi links are too clear and prevalent to pretend that any other connection is equally meaningful.
GOG said it stopped the mailout when it noticed the error, and is “revising our review process to enforce more checks and catch these mistakes earlier.”
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