Well, I know the cause now but it’s still not that good a reason if they were warned and decided not to use it in Germany…
Comment on GOG seemingly shares that they are considering physical PC 'big box' games. Maybe?
DarkMetatron@feddit.org 1 day agoIt was not Nazi symbolism, well not intentionally at least. They used Slavic runes that, in the intended fonts, looks very different from the Nazi symbols. It came to the issue because in some fonts the Slavic runes are displayed without serifs and with hard lines which makes them appear problematic. So it was kind of a self inflicted homographic attack.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 1 day ago
DarkMetatron@feddit.org 1 day ago
The warning from the german team was not ignored, as far as I understood it, but just arrived to late while the newsletter team was already sending the mails. I also work in a international company with teams all over the world, stuff like that can happen without any ill intend, and so far GOG has shown no negative signs at all. So I tend to accept the explanation that it was only a error, especially with the very bad history that poland had with the nazi regime, Blitzkrieg and all.
Sure one can, and should, put GOG on a personal “watchlist” in case other strange or ugly stuff like this happens, but as long as that is not the case I don’t see any reason to change my use of GOG at all. Humans, and with that companies too, can make and will make errors and I am a big fan of second, or even third, chances. I try to judge by intend not by looks.
PerfectDark@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The warning from the german team was not ignored, as far as I understood it, but just arrived too late while the newsletter team was already sending the mails.
Nope, it was blocked. They asked, were told this is wrong and knew why.
The reason you had it delivered in Germany is because your email preferences are set to English. They only skipped Germany by blocking the German language. They knew it was wrong, avoided the German language and set it to everyone else. Rather than hitting backspace once or twice.
DarkMetatron@feddit.org 20 hours ago
My preference are not set to english, but GOG sometimes things I am in France and from time to time sends me Mails in that undecipherable language so who knows what happened exactly in my case and why I got the mail.
But even with all that information I still classify it as a badly managed marketing stunt then a right wing outing or something like that. Nothing else they do, as far as I know, shows any signs of that.
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Except their excuse that it was part of their culture and why they use it in the first place holds no water according to the developers of the game (part of said culture) as well as many others.
DarkMetatron@feddit.org 1 day ago
Well the games name is “End of the Sun” and it is a Slavic game, so using a slavic sun rune is not that extremely far fetched. Why using it double, which lead to the SS appearance, i``s another question and it was dumb at least. But I still don’t see ill intent, when something like that happens once I am fair enough to accept that people can do things in error. I still try to see the good in people
DarkMetatron@feddit.org 1 day ago
I can’t find a official statement from GOG with that content, only statements where they say that it was a error both in the internal processes, with not waiting for the responses of all internationale, especially in this case the german, teams before sending the newsletter and with checking if the runes could be problematic in some fonts.
The runes themself are both from the intended design and from the connected meaning and symbolism unproblematic, yes they can look problematic in the wrong fonts but that is more a problem of font design then of ill intent.
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 day ago
www.reddit.com/r/gog/comments/1txmcyd/…/opxtour/?…
Second sentence is literally the GOG rep stating is part of their culture. The reply is the dev explicitly stating they avoided several of the runes sent because of the connotations. Comments are full of people pointing out that they did not use the rune they claimed they did based on the Unicode and pointing out that in history using the double rune has had no meaning.
The developers also pointed out in a different spot they changed their logo because the old one had connotations they wanted to avoid but that GOG used the old one, despite having the new less problematic one.
Nothing GOG said passes the sniff test.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 1 day ago
I agree, the combination of the incorrect character, the “random” doubling of it and the way they did not respect the developer’s decision to change their logo makes it hard to believe it was a mistake.
To me it really sounds like the change of logo made some piece of shit angry, and then they thought they’d “correct” it.