The email in the comments
Gaben, “we aren’t a monopoly there’s plenty of other publishers to buy from”
GOG
Email came out of nowhere
Submitted 4 days ago by VetOfTheSeas@discuss.online to [deleted]
https://discuss.online/pictrs/image/89bf5974-5e03-4057-baa9-ada733689d8e.gif
Comments
blindbunny@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Steam once again using the winning strategy of doing nothing while your opponent fucks up
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 4 days ago
interesting how easily is for a company to not shoot itself in the foot if they don’t have public shareholders
kata1yst@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Where’s the game store footgun meme?
MrChewy@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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…
Tattorack@lemmy.world 3 days ago
HereIAm@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
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.
Herr_S_aus_H@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
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.
echodot@feddit.uk 3 days ago
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.
CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
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.
red_sock@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
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.
CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
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…)
VitoRobles@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Racists wil Fuck around and then plead ignorance to avoid Finding Out.
HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub 3 days ago
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?
CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Idk about the polish feminist movement, but, respectfully, what the fuck are you on about
(Polish feminist lightning bolt I could find with 5s of research, they seem to do a pretty good job at differentiating their logo by having a single bolt with a different shape that is red and black instead of black and white. Red and black are usually associated with anti fascism btw)
j4yc33@piefed.social 4 days ago
People can shit on Valve all they want, but at least they never went full Nazi.
jagermo@feddit.org 4 days ago
100 % ai. Llms love emojis in subject lines
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 4 days ago
The strange thing is that they did notice It and elected to not send it in German instead of just not putting the symbols in the subject.
someguy3@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Iirc Germany has laws against it, so they probably wanted to avoid legal issues
Anarki_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
They are not emoji 😓
M137@lemmy.today 3 days ago
How is this one of several comments here calling them emojis? How are you all somehow here on Lemmy while seemingly having grandma level tech illiteracy?
They’re not emojis, they’re ascii characters. Emojis are emojis, a very limited set of pictures. These are not that.Miaou@jlai.lu 3 days ago
They’re not ASCII characters you dipshit. Learn how to use a computer before going around lecturing others.
FleetingNoise@programming.dev 3 days ago
is extremely pretentious and pedantic
somehow doesn’t know about unicode despite being compelled to technically “acshually” people
okay bud you need to calm down a little before posting stuff
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Lol I love how you got your shit rocked after being so condescending
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 3 days ago
Nah it’s the new email marketing meta. So many emojis and ASCII symbols. It’s the new play to try to stand out from all of the existing ad industry noise in people’s email inboxes
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 3 days ago
All of which have emojis now…
kamen@lemmy.world 3 days ago
“Found my grandpa’s helmet. He must’ve been an electrician or something.”
shiftymccool@piefed.ca 4 days ago
The Nazis didn’t invent those symbols, they appropriated them. It’s ridiculous that a group of assholes can erase centuries of history by misusing symbols
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The nazis (in particular their graphic designer Walter Heck) did literally invent the sigrune/doppelrune, it doesn’t have roots in history and there is no excuse for them to have sent it.
lath@lemmy.world 4 days ago
He didn’t invent shit. He copied a rune and appropriated it diagonally. S, N, Z whatever, it’s the same damn thing. Sowilo.
Ppl keep praising his ass here like he wrote the bible or some shit when all he did was take what was already there and twisted it.
PineRune@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The Elder Futhark predates Nazi Germany by well over 1,000 years. Wikipedia says it was used between the 2nd to 8th centuries.
elevenbones@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
BladeFederation@piefed.social 4 days ago
This is debatable. But when you’re using them all together though…
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Culture is always evolving. Some words and symbols have had different meaning in the past than they do now. With context it can be fine to use them without association with the stronger cultural associations. If I see a swastika on a Buddhist temple, I’m not going to assume the Buddhists are Nazis. But if I see a symbol or word without context I’m going to assume the strongest association to that symbol in my culture. Just how culture works.
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 3 days ago
So in the case of the emails, where there is plenty of context, it’s not an issue. Right?
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Shut up and hate Nazis with us. Or are you a Nazi too?
Mwa@thelemmy.club 3 days ago
i mean a word can be normal in the past for example and then turned racist,etc and vice versa.
for example “queer” was a Lgbtq Slur but it was (mostly) turned normal.captainlezbian@lemmy.world 3 days ago
True, but unfortunately it’s the case
stickly@lemmy.world 3 days ago
People really tearing GoG to shreds here but I don’t really understand why. I’m not a GoG 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 companies with an established history of killing puppies.
CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
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.
sukhmel@programming.dev 3 days ago
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
stickly@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
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.
khaleer@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
I don’t get all this noise too, being nazi is finally cool again! Those woke lefties want to break all good things again…
VitoRobles@lemmy.today 3 days ago
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.
Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I don’t think it was malicious but it’s still a big gaffe, especially coming from Poland, of all countries.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 3 days ago
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.
ICastFist@programming.dev 3 days ago
PapstJL4U@lemmy.world [bot] 4 days ago
This is really the whole incident is more than the sum of it’s parts stuff, but in a negative way.
Mwa@thelemmy.club 3 days ago
Ofc GOG became bad after They started requiring devs to use AI tools for the GOG Galaxy client.
GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The transphobic company is also a nazi company.
I am shocked, shocked I say.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
transohobic company
Yo imma need some blue text about that
Pat_Riot@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Epic use of Epic Rap Battles clip
CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Good Old
GamingGoebbelsDarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 3 days ago
McGuirk808@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
TiredGoose@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Stupid marketing fuckup. Still it’s my preferred store because no DRM.
imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
What exactly happened? Newsletter email name had some nazi symbols as far as I can see. But why? Did they stated something for nazi? Or was it just a hacker prank? Any statements like at all?
architect@thelemmy.club 3 days ago
Mmhmm. At least I can stop lying and pretending gog is any good now.
Evotech@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Fucking calm your this lmao. It’s aascii character, it can’t hurt you
DylanMc6@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Steam: “Suck my robot balls”
HotsauceHurricane@lemmy.world 3 days ago
pretty certain itwas mostly a font rendering fuck-up. that being said, the should have diyched the symbols altogether.
Jarix@lemmy.world 3 days ago
This does make me think we should brand this onto the forehead of every ICE member
FrowingFostek@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Is this in connection to the Colombian president’s post?
VetOfTheSeas@discuss.online 4 days ago
Image
lime@feddit.nu 4 days ago
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.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Their “apology” actually admitted that they knew about the potential for rendering differences. They say they knew that certain symbols could render as Nazi icons, which is why they specifically excluded those symbols from the email they sent to German accounts.
But if we extend that same “we didn’t send it to Germany” thing to the logical conclusion, it means they intentionally sent it to everyone else even when knowing the potential for issues.
VitoRobles@lemmy.today 3 days ago
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.
stupidcasey@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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…
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Sure there’s intent. Obviously!
CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Do you happen to have your GOG account in Germany or in German language?
lemmyseikai@lemmy.world 4 days ago
You forgot to hide your name.
maltasoron@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
The screenshot is from the PCGamer article
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Andy really narrows it down
Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
I don’t have the email but I would assume those emojis in this case are Slavic neopaganist symbols, also known as rodnovery.
…wikimedia.org/…/Category:Rodnover_symbols
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Yes, but. Big but.
The devs of the games included in that email signed off on it before it went out. The version the devs were shown had no “runes” included.
GOG has acknowledged that those runes can display on some devices distinctly as the symbol for the SS, so they did not send this email to subscribers subscribed in the German language. Instead of just using a different fucking symbol, or not using it twice in a row.
As far as I understand it, those are pretty random runes, not specifically Slavic at all.
Taken as a whole, it shows that they had some idea of how this would appear, and they went through with it anyway, for no obvious benefit.
Not a good look.
fiat_lux@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
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
M137@lemmy.today 3 days ago
“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.
Obnomus@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Thats it?
spitfire@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Image