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I’m here wondering if this quote is going to age like milk or not.
Anyone ITT saying GOG is run by Nazis because some AI or intern or something used slavic symbols on an email newsletter better not use any of the following brands:
Volkswagen, Porsche, BMW, Bayer, IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase, Ford, General Motors, Chanel, Fanta, Shein, Temu, Zara, H&M, Nike, Adidas, Puma, Gucci, Prada, Dior, Armani, Versace, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Louis Vuitton, L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, McDonald’s, KFC, Tyson Foods.
If you’ve ever bought any of these brands or even used one of their products once you’re also a Nazi, you exploit humans and animals and should be blacklisted from all jobs probably even killed or something idk.
There’s probably more brands. Comment them as you see fit!
/s
Only 3, but I don’t know some of the brands so not sure if they own other stuff I do. Probably safer to assume all brands are unless proven otherwise.
Straight to the gulag for you!
Oh my GOD, they got KFC!?
GOG seems to cap installer downloads to 4mbps. Cyberpunk’s installer has 28 parts. Huge bummer
(carribean proverb: maybe less to download if properly compressed)Try using IDM or Jdownloader, IDM worked well for me.
I still don’t like their AI stance.
- can’t you just copy the game files to another engine, Only Buy non steam DRM games or copy some DLLS that makes the game playable on Steam(not sure if this is fine to do) ?
Their AI stance? What is that about?
i heard that for the GOG Galaxy client they want the devs to use AI
Use AI for what purpose, to what extent, and with which mindset? I think you’ll be hard pressed to find dev organizations today that don’t at all use AI tools to some degree. There’s a difference between pushing vibecoded slop that no one understands (including the developer that prompted it), and using LLMs as productivity tools in a responsible way, with sufficient oversight.
I think vibe coding IDK
This is the message we need to hear. The bread and butter. I get so tired of people nitpicking GOG and Mozilla over every relatively minor thing when they are some of the only people trying to hold back the deluge of bullshit.
The Nazi thing is nota nitpick though. They need to address that properly instead of the “sorry we got caught” response they gave.
GOG’s founder did eventually give a better reply here (scroll to Mikee’s comment): https://www.gog.com/forum/general/nazi_symbols_in_an_email_and_bs_excuse/page18
I’m not convinced GOG owes us any explanation beyond that. Even in the worst case where the accusers are right and it was an intentional dog-whistle, the marketing guy who did it probably gave his superiors the same explanation we got, in which case GOG management genuinely believes they already 100% told us what happened.
Also, the argument that GOG not sending the email to Germany proves they knew that it was bad ahead of time on an organizational level is common enough to be worth addressing here. It ignores how localization is often done, one person writing a template that then goes to others to localize and send out individually. I assume adding some review time between localization and send out is among the process changes they mentioned.
Is this about the Gog Newsletter thing? I’m not 100% informed, but didn’t they pretty much admit that they weren’t aware that ᛋ displayed as ϟ in some devices?
It’s not even a “sorry we got caught” thing, they had nothing to gain by sending a Nazi symbol in their newsletter. What more are they supposed to say?
Yeah that is not hard to do at all. This is not an unreasonable standard.
Mozilla is the best browser to ever exist and I will die on this hill.
You mean Firefox? Or is Mozilla the actual core or something? I thought they were just a company or a foundation or whatever
I’ve been a gamer for almost 4 decades, so I have quite a lot of experience wanting to run games that I remember were a lot of fun and it turns out they are so old they won’t run anymore.
Typically it’s one of 3 things:
- The hardware I have now won’t support it (say, I don’t have a floopy drive anymore, or they’re from an entirelly different architecture such as the pre-PC game consoles). There’s also quirky ones such as games made at a time when CPUs were so slow that the game just runs as fast as it can (which was fine for older CPUs, but not for CPUs which are thousands of times faster) rather than use the system clock to set its tempo.
- The OS I have won’t support it. Say, it’s a DOS or Windows 3.1 game
- The game has DRM which relies on shit which doesn’t apply anymore (for example, OS quirks that aren’t present in newer OS versions).
There are often ways around the first two - for the hardware sometimes you can get modern versions of older hardware (for example you can actually get an external USB Floppy Disk Drive) and if it’s old enough there will be emulators, whilst for the OS it’s either emulators or adaptor layers.
Only way around the third is either a game crack or the game having no DRM to begin with.
Now, outside the transition of hardware architectures (say, from Amiga to PC) this used to apply maybe after a game was out 10 - 20 years. In the Phone-home DRM generation this seems to apply much faster - the game maker just turns off their servers 5 - 10 years after the game is out and now you can’t legally play that game anymore.
All this to say that GOG and Pirates are the only ones fighting the good fight on making sure we won’t suffer this shit some years from now, which is even more important now that we’re in the Phone-home DRM age.
Agreed. Someone complained Firefox moved to updates every few days or something.
They had no clue Firefox updates like all the time.
Do they? Maybe for minor releases but I’m pretty sure Firefox is currently doing major releases every 4 weeks and starting from September they’re going to do it byweekly. Personally I don’t see what the big deal is but I can absolutely see someone on the fediverse being outraged by the idea of a more frequent release schedule.
Ran into someone complaining about the same with Edge and updates going to every 4 weeks. Showed them the release log where they have been releasing one to two times a week - minor updates but still updates that require the browser to be restarted but that the person never noticed.
byweekly I think you mean semi-weekly. Bi-weekly is twice per week
Also it means every 2 weeks. Which is the case here.
Semi-weekly however ONLY means twice per week.
Also it means every 2 weeks
Only for people that can’t speak English
Every fortnight
https://writingexplained.org/bi-weekly-vs-semi-weekly
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/semiweekly
https://www.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/bi-vs-semi-weeklymonthlyannually/
You are pedantic-ing and getting it backwards.
Pull out disc with a game from 10 years ago
Installs just fine and launches
“Connecting to online services…”
“Timeout: Retry? Quit?”
Huh?
It’s exactly GOG’s thing that games sold there can’t have any DRM, so this scenario is out. (Also, no disk with GOG games ;))
Probably why you won’t find things like Red Dead Redeption II (PC) in GOG, since Rockstar wants to force you to register in their systems to get your sweet, sweet private info. (Curiously, the pirated version has no such anti-consumer crap)
In my experience as a gamer for almost 4 decades, the most likely scenario with a really old game is that it simply won’t install or run in the OS version or even hardware that you have now, though give it enough time and somebody out there will have created an emulator or adaptor layer for it (like DOSBox).
But yeah, any game from the Phone-home DRM generation which isn’t bought from a seller which has No DRM policy (which only GOG has, as far as I know - even itch.io doesn’t have a No DRM policy) will almost certainly have an artificially created end-of-life that has nothing to do with the OS or hardware you have being too new for the game.
They sometimes also provide alternative versions of games. I was very happy to buy Kane and Lynch (1 and 2), but the co-op feature is missing (both local and online). I guess that part was licensed differently or something
I don’t think GOG allow games like that on their platform.
Witcher 3 hard copies required activation to your GOG account before they could work. Hitman (2016) was 70% locked behind the worst DRM in human history, but they sold it on their store until they were pressured by customers not to.
And Devotion still ain’t ‘preserved’ because the CCCP hivemind told them not to have it on their site, and they obeyed instantly.
GOG can suck all the dicks with that self-righteous bullshit.
Oh shit they’re not 100% perfect
So your examples for why they’re bad are something they did a decade ago and something they did because the alternative was losing their entire Chinese market.
You’re scraping the barrel. GOG must be doing things right if this is all you can come up with.
Well there’s the Nazi emails and gen AI sale art if you want something more recent.
And they don’t do regional pricing. Buying a game on GOG is nearly twice as expensive in my currency compared to someone in the US or EU.
Are we just forgetting that Gog is ran by nazis?
Wait really? Not disbelieving you. Just genuinely didn’t know.
ngl if this is the only proof there is of them being nazis then I don’t believe they’re nazis. If they were, there would be more evidence beyond an email subject and I doubt a nazi organization would put these symbols in a random email anyway.
This is just fodder for people who like to performatively accuse everyone of being a nazi for their dopamine fix while knowing zero about how actual nazi organizations function or behave.
They knew it was a nazi symbol and intentionally didn’t send it to German users where it could get them into legal trouble. They said as much in their “”“apology”“”.
Sorry, but you can’t say “it was an accident, I didn’t know” if I catch you sneaking around trying to avoid being caught doing something.
At the very least more than one person knew what was happening, including, apparently, the person in charge of that PR message.
Given that, and the fact that no one was fired for this, it seems a lot like like they’re infested with nazis to me. Hell of a lot of smoke for there not to be a fire.
I never actually saw the mail before. I read the GOG apology and assumed they used runes that looked a bit too similar, but looking at the screenshot they full on used the Siegrune at least.
Rereading the apology, they might not be Nazi’s but they’re definitely not sorry enough to give a proper apology for using Nazi imagery. That’s not a good look either.
So basically some idiot intern stuck Nazi symbols in a mass email to see if they would get away with it. I’m sorry but I’m going to need stronger evidence than this before I believe the claim that “GOG is being run by Nazis”.
They don’t get to say “sorry it was an accident” when they specifically didn’t send the message to German users (which could get them into legal trouble).
They also don’t get to say “it was one Nazi intern acting on their own” when no one was fired for it.
And by the way, the “it was one rogue intern” narrative is not something they ever claimed or implied in any of their PR messages. They would look a hell of a lot better if that’s what happened, but that’s not the case.
You don’t know whether or not someone was fired for it or not. They aren’t obligated to do everything in their power to appease people like you who jump to wild conclusions based on a single piece of flimsy evidence because chances are you would still go on trying to sustain this weird narrative anyway.
This isn’t 2016 anymore. Nazis and white supremacists don’t operate in hiding. They’re in seats of major power. Believing they’re secretly in control of a niche gaming market based on an email and a nonchalant response is just cringe behavior from people who need to touch grass.
Daniel Berntsson is the co-founder of Mullvad, a highly regarded Swedish VPN service. That reputation is likely about to take a hit, though, since we’ve just learned that the guy donated 5 million kronor (around €450,000) to the Swedish far-right party Örebropartiet.
And don’t go thinking this is just a rumor - Berntsson confirmed it himself by email to the journal Flamman, which broke the story: “it’s a personal donation from me.”
Those 5 million kronor represent roughly 72% of everything the party took in during 2025, and it’s also the largest private donation made to any Swedish political party that year. That’s not nothing. And Örebropartiet’s obsession is “re-emigration” - i.e., sending all immigrants out of the country - which their leader Markus Allard describes as getting rid of “parasites.”
https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.html
It wasn’t that long ago we learned that the Mullvad cofounder was using his money to fund a far right party trying to kick out all immigrants. We can absolutely still learn new things about people, even if there are a lot of Nazis running around out in the open.
Sounds like they should apologize for the obvious use of Nazi symbols and state they fired the intern responsible, not apologize for an “unfortunate visual association”.
paywall poop
I posted another link as well.
deleted by creator
Didn’t know
Sonnenrad (Black Sun)
Kolovrat (Spinning Sun)
Double Siegrune (SS)
How is this not also true for Steam? Unless the game itself has DRM, I can copy game files to an offline machine that doesn’t have Steam installed and launch and play them normally.
Edit: Glazing GOG for this while insisting “sTeAm iS dIfFeReNt” is like buying the cereal box that says “Asbestos Free!” on it.
Ever since that Sony tweet, all these kids are, overnight, developing all these strong opinions about shit they never cared about before, based on nothing but hype, memes, and regurgitated streamer slop.
Physical media has licenses too. GOG purchases come with licenses too. Optical media rots. And Steam isn’t secretly Sony (yet. They probably will be after Gabe dies).
Downvote me all you want, it doesn’t change the truth and reveals much more about you than me.
“Unless the game itselfhas DRM” is the key phrase. Steam itself is a form of DRM if you must install it and login to install and/or run a game.
DRM-free Steam games are the exception, not the rule, unfortunately.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
If the game itself has DRM, then it has DRM on GOG too.
Steam itself is a form of DRM if you must install it and login to install and/or run a game.
Did you read what I wrote?
GOG is drm free and provides offline installers for the games, updates, and dlcs. Even games with drm on steam.
You don’t even need to install their client to download the installers or extras.
If a game has DRM on one platform, but not another, that’s because the publisher required it. That can be for any number of reasons that don’t have anything to do with the platform.
I guess what I’m asking is, what’s the benefit to having the installer instead of the game files?
You have to be online to download the installer. The end result is being able to play normally, offline, from portable storage if you choose. Besides a few gigabytes, it seems like a distinction without a difference.
Gog literally won’t allow you to sell a game if it has DRM, that’s their whole deal as a Platform.
Also having the installers means that if you can install the game files, set whatever environment variables the game needs, create the necessary folders, install the redistributable runtimes the game needs to run,and link the dlls properly. If you only have the game files you have to manage all of that yourself
Gog literally won’t allow you to sell a game if it has DRM
So, Steam respects their customers enough to offer them a choice while GOG doesn’t; good to know.
set whatever environment variables the game needs, create the necessary folders, install the redistributable runtimes the game needs to run,and link the dlls properly
Ok, and? I can do all that on Steam too. I can even launch the game directly without involving Steam at all.
If you only have the game files you have to manage all of that yourself
Yeah, and all that is a huge pain in the ass. Having it to do myself isn’t a positive.
While thats a list of plenty of unfortunate things, it’s not exactly what people mean by drm, and in some cases kind of absurd for them to conflate.
DRM is generally refering to restrictions on your ability to install, share, and use a game.
Games having extra content thats connected to an online server or the creation of an account is unfortunate but not drm, theres also out dated ones in that list like the twitch drops in cyberpunk just being in the game now.
Online games having anti cheats and dependencies, or wanting you to have an account is also unfortunate especially if invasive but not a restriction on your ability to install or share a game.
In that list im only seeing DEFCON and Multiwinia having a key verification server which is supposed to be disabled in the offline installers. other games mention having verifications removed some seemingly unsuccessfully at the time of that post.
Alot of these things are issues with games preservation in general, something that GOG actually does alot to help with, theres plenty of old games that come with fixes, patches, and dlls that make them run on modern hardware that other online stores that still sell the games don’t provide.
The thing about it not being drm is you can backup the installers, you can just give them to a friend, it doesnt phone home and check if this computer has some license, it doesn’t try and match hardware, or limit you to a certain number of installs.
Yes.
Just a quick reminder that discs that you burn yourself at home do degrade pretty quickly, much faster than pressed discs. I personally have had burned discs that failed after approx. 6 years. It can happen even faster if you use low-quality discs. Even pressed discs can fail after 20 years if you are unlucky.
Using 2 big HDDs (2 for redundancy) full of your installers might be safer in the long run and also easier to manage and backup.
Yeah a HDD with another for periodic backups would be a lot more reliable.
From what I recall, only self-burnt CD’s and DVD’s degrade quickly, while self-burnt blu-rays last significantly longer, even if not m-discs.
Apparently blu-rays are even worse than other discs. This is from the abstract of an accelerated ageing study (sadly I don’t have access to the whole paper):
Overall, the stability of the Blu-ray formats was poor with many discs significantly degraded after only 21 days of accelerated ageing. In addition to large increases in error rates, many discs showed easily identifiable visible degradation in several different forms. In a comparison with other optical disc formats examined previously, Blu-ray stability ranked very low.
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/res-2017-0016/html
Yep! Quote from digitalfaq
The BD-R write-once type is based on a completely new concept for the recording layer utilizing a two-layer structure composed of silicon (Si) and copper alloy (Cu) inorganic materials. When heated by the recording laser beam, these melt and the Si and Cu alloy become a composite forming recording marks. Because the material is inorganic, it is not affected by light, thus realizing a disc with outstandingly high reliability in terms of archivability.
And another quote from the same source
Write-once recordable DVD-R/DVD+R media (as well as CD-R media) all uses synthetic organic based dyes – usually azoic dyes (metallized azo chelates or azo metal chelate). Some of them are based on other synthetic organics, such as cyanine, dipyrrometheme or oxonol.
Your source is just a forum quoting manufacturer marketing texts.
In an accelerated ageing study blu-ray performed worse than other discs:
Overall, the stability of the Blu-ray formats was poor with many discs significantly degraded after only 21 days of accelerated ageing. In addition to large increases in error rates, many discs showed easily identifiable visible degradation in several different forms. In a comparison with other optical disc formats examined previously, Blu-ray stability ranked very low.
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/res-2017-0016/html
Plus you can store more games on each one. Don’t they cost quite a bit per disc though?
You can get a 50 pack of Verbatim’s standard BD-R for ~$40 AUD, or their premium Datalifeplus discs for ~$100 AUD. I’ve used both of these discs, and I’ve run burn quality tests and they’re both great. This is just talking about single layer discs, so 25GB per disc. 50GB discs are reasonably priced, 100GB and 128GB start getting a bit rich.
Oh yeah, its the very long life ones I was thinking of that cost a lot. If there are more regular ones at lower prices with still a moderate lifespan then that probably makes more sense.
That’s why I print out all my downloaded games
I hope you also laminate them for longevity.
Sure, but what if there’s a fire!? My favorite game is Ocarina of Time. I don’t want to risk losing it, so I memorized the binary digits that comprise the code. Can’t be too careful!
Hope you keep your brain safe. Even then illness can easily rob you of those memories.
Fully agree. This is why I’ve made multiple children. Then I train them on the binary digits the way other parents teach shapes, numbers, and the ABCs. Can’t be too careful, it’s best to have multiple backups
I laminate my punch cards for longevity. Wouldn’t want them breaking down.
I prefer to cut archival cards from 0.7mm 316 stainless steel sheet 👍
Clay tablets have been demonstrated to last much longer than paper or metal
Nonsense. I got some high quality copper from a merchant I fully trust and I bet this will last forever.
Was his name Ea? His name isn’t known today for being engraved in copper…
I suspect corrosion-resistant steel alloys haven’t been around long enough to prove themselves in that regard XD
I can already see them rusting down by the harbour. Meanwhile people still find bits of ceramics left from ages last on the beaches.
So if you bury your clay tablets in a treasure chest it should be good.
Corrosion-resistent is not the same as non-corrosive.
I suppose gold as a noble metal would be stable over a long period, as it’s non-reactive. But certain kinds of acids can still dissolve it, unlike ceramic
The special ones, yes
I eat those to gain their power.
Print them on clay tablets. Those will stand the test of time, especially with the right level of error correction. (Sorry for the ad cancer - I didn’t want to promote a specific brand or spend forever finding a good review site.)
Can confirm, clay tablets can last thousands of years to archive your
grievancesdata.Unfortunately I’m allergic to clay
You should really move to microfilm. It saves so much space!
It just doesn’t smell the same
Use M-Disc media. It’s said to last 1000 years. It’s expensive and very slow to rip at the suggested 4x speed.
I’ve been very satisfied with them, and you just need a regular Blu-Ray drive.
You need an M-DISC BluRay drive.
Verbatim Datalife HTL BD-R discs are supposedly made in a similar technology (some folk on r/datahoarder think they’re exactly the same but idk). At the very least they won’t have the same problem as DVDs (no organic dye) and they actually work out cheaper than half decent HDDs. I can get 25GBx50 cake for £30. I’ve only started burning them a year or two ago so time will tell if I lose my data :x.
Cheapest solution is an HDD + one more for backups. M-Discs for 15-17€ per 100GB are for the games you wanna take to your grave.
I mean they are games that i no longer have to worry about data corruption or loss. Like ever. And i can Will these to family & friends. The cost is easily worth that!
Yeah, normal burners are more like printers, where the write laser activates or deactivates a pigment which then either reflects or absorbs the read laser to represent 0/1. But that pigment can degrade over time, turning 1s into 0s.
M-discs are instead etched and iirc use constructive and destructive interference so the reader (which is the same reader as normal discs, just the writer needs to specifically support M-disc) reads the 0/1. It will also degrade over time, but since it’s a thicker layer of difference, it will last significantly longer than a thin layer of pigment. And I bet that special m-disc specific readers could be made to read it again after it degrades to the point where the interference technique stops working, since an image could still show where the high and low points are, even if the waves don’t align perfectly anymore.
In practice, I’ve found that the drive was way easier to find than the media for m-disc. Like most optical disc writers these days seem to support it but the discs are expensive af compared to non m-disc.
Though when I was going through my old burnt CDs and DVDs, I was surprised at how well they were holding up. I was expecting at least some read errors by now but everything has been fine so far.
Well, other than the data quality lol. Not like the readability of the file but stuff that took days to download back then would download today in seconds and a good monitor I got well after my early files was only 720p for its resolution. The data I prized as a youth is kinda sad today.
blu ray in this economy?
What about Verbatim AZO? I’ve heard good stuff about those, and they’re not expensive.
Also, as far as CDs go, I’ve found that an old degraded player which doesn’t read burned discs anymore but plays pressed discs will still play burned AZO discs just fine.
Are tape drives still a thing?
Yup
If I were more serous I would probably get a couple of those. I remember it being part of our procedures at a gov office.
And reminder that solid state drives (including thumb drives) can lose data after a couple years if they are not plugged in from time to time
Big Disc propaganda
Big Disc Energy
It can happen even faster if you use low-quality discs.
Yep. I got some no-name DVDs at Kaufland as they were just EUR 1 for a 10-pack. They started having read issues after just 4 years.
Also, they easily peel apart with just fingers and no effort.Edit:
Packaging:
Media ID: MBI 01RG40The worst case I experienced was a disc that disintegrated after a couple years. It got an actual extra hole in it, in a way that looked like somebody spilled acid on it and the acid burned right through the disc. In reality it just lay in my drawer.
In your acid draw?
Try M-Disc, it’s supposed to be as good as microfilm for archival.
yup. God knows how many Dreamcast games I’ve had to toss and reburn over the years.
I’m done with GOG after the NeoNazi shit.
I can’t believe you got downvoted for pointing out their nazi comms lmao
Can you provide further information so more people can decide to boycott them too?
We can’t have anything anymore huh…
ACK! I saw the comments!!!
Seriously, that’s proper fucked up. I thought it might be one of the more obscure, mystic symbols… NOPE! It’s the SS.
OOPSY
What’s this now?
They sent out an email for a game, and included a bunch of very sus Nazi related runes in the title.
They first said they noticed how it would look and opted not to include them in the German email, showing they knew how it would be seen and still did it.
They changed their story a few times and later issued a weak apology without explaining anything or showing how they plan to ensure it doesn’t happen again or hold anyone accountable.
Oh boy, that’s fun :(
deleted by creator
GOG trying to drum up positive pr after that Nazi symbol newsletter.
I bet you will be forgotten about it in 2 days if it was Steam who send it
nah valve can eat shit too. look at that I can hate two things at once. dab on it.
Didn’t they instantly flag that? It was for some slavic game thing and all of those symbols are rooted in cultures long gone that nazis appropriated.
The symbol alone was OK, but they doubled it to read SS, and they didn’t send it to Germany; which means it was 100% intentional and not just a little oopsie.
That’s because the German team flagged it.
I don’t think it’s a good look but to decry they’re nazis for an email showing runic alphabet and slavic symbols doesn’t exactly trigger me too hard. It really sounds like someone fucked up.
People out there still buying Bayer products and they genuinely were part of the Holocaust, a huge part of it. Ford, Volkswagen, etc.
No matter who flags “you platformed Nazi shit”, you immediately escalate this, halt all outgoing communication until you got a lid on this and fix whatever led to that happening.
Maybe if it was more severe. But like I said in another comment, what did they accomplish here? Is there some huge master plan? Did they all sit down and come up with a plot to transform us all into nazis? What’s the end game here?
Hanlon’s Razor dude, likely it was something stupid that happened.
There is no benefit for them doing this. And doing what you suggested would be some serious pandering for a bunch of unserious pearl clutchers who likely own hanes clothing, buy coke products and drive fords without a second thought of how it has affected the planet and other humans. The only reason most people care about this is because the news told them to or they read it on reddit. Unserious people.
Are you kidding me? They sent Nazi symbols to users.
Not just “nordic symbols that happen to be used in Nazi symbology” but an unmistakable sequence of symbols only used by Nazis (and people teaching others about Nazis).
Also how are you supposed to learn about anything if not the news lol? What weird argument is that supposed to be?
And now we’re all nazis for it, they sure got us 🙄
Have you never heard the revolution will not be televised? The government will not educate you about their own wrongdoings? I’m pretty sure most of us here treat all news with a little skepticism which is why most are here and stopped using reddit.
Sorry someone sending an email with some symbols as the tagline isn’t enough for me to get out the noose and piss my pants.
There’s a world where someone uses a kolovrat or a sigel without intending to relate them to the Nazis. There is not a world where they use both a kolovrat and two sigels in a row and don’t know what it means. Maybe someone at GOG didn’t catch on, but the devs knew what was up.
So we think the entire dev team, marketing team and anyone else involved had a whole meeting and plan to do this? What’s the end goal?
Hanlon’s Razor dude. Going to need more for me to decry the Nazi label onto someone.
no goal beyond having a laugh at triggering people with nazi symbols; same as NYT did with their Nazi symbol crossword.
The fact the apology didn’t make an effort to say something like “those responsible have been sacked” and instead said something like “nazis shouldn’t have all the Nordic symbols” told me all I needed to know about their workplace environment and the types that work there. no bueno for me.
Not saying I’m boycotting them, because ethical consumerism is near impossible, but I’m not going to rally behind them or applaud them for anything like they’re to be championed sans asterisk.
I really doubt that’s even what happened here. I don’t think the people who run the company, any member of the marketing team or even anyone important sat down in a meeting to decide this for a fuckin laugh.
It’s probably some dumb AI, some intern or some individual fuck or just a genuine mistake. The character doesn’t even render the same on every platform. Maybe if there was more than this one event I’d be more interested but I really think this is goofy.
Especially because I know most people crying about it have definitely owned something Microsoft or IBM related and don’t even consider it.
Most people only care cause they read an article about it and are genuinely looking for any excuse to hop on their high horse and act high and mighty.
It’s silly. I bet you can get most Wolfenstein games on GOG. We gonna be mad now because that game has Nazi symbolism in it? C’mon.
No one listens to the logos of God. It’s either the pathos or the ethos; the emotional arguments or the ones that fall squarely on authority holding up what they say is true. Like, I can explain to you that everything you experience is in your brain, so all experiences must correlate with something in your neurons, so these words you’re reading on this device are actually inside you, and thus the Earth isn’t real as the Buddha and the kid that bent spoons at the Oracle’s in the Matrix explain. Cognitive dissonance is king in this world, because the rift between what we’re told is going on and what is really going on is absolutely enormous. Some game studio trying to capitalize on a demographic doesn’t perturb me. Corporations are going to corporate. What bothers me is how the sheep behave in response to such dipshit shepherds who have taken the reins of the flock. You’ve let this happen to yerselves.
Wow what a super condescending way to say absolutely nothing worthwhile.
This rune displays differently depending on what program or app you view it in. The game itself was something about a sun which is what the symbol represents.
If GOG was full Nazi I’m sure they have better ways to express it. I think it’s super pathetic and screams of pearl clutching to dive on the Nazi label and freak out. It’s also so dumb to assume the entire team is in on it like they sat down and plotted this whole scheme. Could be a stupid intern, could be overworked skeleton crew, could be AI.
Sorry you’re gonna need more than that for me to become a giant weiner about a stupid game company I could not care less about.
Also stop being such a tool.
The symbol alone was OK
Not really
No, it was the lightning SS symbols.
Combined with a kolovrat.
There’s no clearer way to say “we are Nazis” other than saying “we are Nazis”.
Depending on how your client rendered them.
You guys really trying to make an elephant out of a gnat.
“SS” runes and a kolovrat is completely impossible to be interpreted as anything else but “we are immense fucking Nazis”
The only way you could be clearer is by writing “we are Nazis”.
These symbols appearing together means that someone put them there who is a Nazi or wants to teach others about Nazi symbols.
Last time I checked, platforming Nazis is very much an elephant kind of thing.
sorry I like to remind people not to get cozy rooting for for-profit corporations that’ve shown some ick recently. took as much effort to remind as it did for the post, but whatever constitutes “elephant” in your book.
Hey, watch you don’t criticize gamers’ favourite Nazi bar.
Yeah, that was a major WTF moment
You could do this before that incident as well.
No shit, you somehow didn’t understand their comment.
If only they would post more stuff on Bluesky or even use Mastodon instead of TwitterX
(Yes, i am aware they have a bluesky profile but they post less stuff on there, it seems)
The Nazi rune company hangs out at the Nazi bar? I’m shocked.
I absolutely adore GOG for being like this, and for consistently applying pressure to publishers and other marketplace vendors alike.
I just also have A Steam Library with like 1200+ titles, and it’s measured in Terabytes. And butrot in my physical media will be non zero, in long enough timescale.
I consider my continued patronage of buying games to be my subscription costs to the platform vendors. 🤣
Bit rot is already happening to my PS2 games. MGS2 is completely dead for me now. Its a copy I’ve had since I was a kid when it came out.
The only way to be sure is to save it on a quartz matrix. Only issue is it’s read-only. Not rewritable ever. Once you etch your data into quartz that’s it.
Storage is amazing, though. All of human knowledge (so far) has already been etched into such a storage medium by the UN a few years ago. It fits in the palm of your hand.
Or… you could just follow the 3-2-1 strategy with normal drives and regular scrubs. For most purposes (including a game library) that’s way better.
Let’s play a game, of how much this would cost today.
But I want my game library to survive the sun’s expansion!
Archive multiple copies with something that has error-correcting codes. Use btrfs, zfs, par2, rar, raid-5, DVDs etc
To preserve “pagan” games or are we talking about another GOG?
Roll my fuckin eyes.
Hey, as a “pagan” (practitioner of a Left-Hand Path centered on Lilith) myself, I’d warn you not to commit to religious intolerance conflating paganism, which includes Rodnovery, a Slavic Native Faith likely the one depicted in the The End of the Sun game, with the shitty nazi dog whistle done at the sole discretion of GOG. The devs of the game made it clear that they had absolutely nothing to do with the infamous GOG newsletter and its nazi dog whistle. We pagans have nothing to do with shitty far-right bigotry.
Yeah I’m still pretty concerned about that whole event but it seems like everyone has just forgotten about it.
I could have forgiven the initial email as a rogue nazi intern but their official response being “we made sure not to send it to Germans and its on you all for seeing nazi symbols as nazi symbols” is pretty fucking problematic. Also before anyone defends them as just being pagan symbols, the ones they chose to use were both modern creations by nazi germany
For anyone who’s not up to date: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-nazi-runes-to-its-followers/
I definitely agree that using those innocuous Unicode characters in the way they did was someone’s subtle attempt at evoking Nazi imagery, but the whole Germany part of this story is meaningless. Germany is known for having excessive language restrictions, to the point where every marketing department has their standard library of phrases and whatnot to not use in Germany. They are used to making substitutions for the German market to swap out genuinely innocuous phrases simply because they have a different connotation in Germany or whatever. As far as we can tell, that was just yet another piece of marketing material that went through some automated regex filter for German subscribers and no one thought twice about it after seeing that fact.
From their reddit post in trying to cover up:
… I also recognize that placing two such runes next to each other could create an unfortunate association with symbols used by the Nazi regime. This was noticed before distribution, and out of respect for local sensitivities, the material was not sent to the German community.
They knew and actively chose to not send it to the country that criminalizes Nazi imagery. To me the Germany stuff is the most damning part.
Yeah 100%. Their response to the event is pretty much where all of my feelings come from on the subject. They explicitly state they knew they were releasing literal nazi iconography and then explicitly chose to put it out where it wouldn’t get them in legal trouble.
Not only that but IIRC they actually changed the original game dev’s marketing material to use the symbols without the devs even knowing.
It’s all pretty fucking damning and it makes me incredibly sad
It always amazes me when people from anarchist servers bend over backwards to make excuses for for-profit private companies.
That was about their German language newsletter though. They have separate, localised newsletters for several markets, which I’d assume are manually translated. Also, as a native German speaker, I really don’t think it’s all that different than other European language regions regarding sensitivities.
Their marketing team was warned that there was some offense images and it would stir trouble in Germany.
Rather than say, “Oh shit this will look bad.” They said, “Oh let’s just change it for Germany.”
Do you not understand the root issue?
That’s conjecture. And I feel like that there are certain things that, when flagged, should be sent back up the pole. Not cause it’s part of the teams job explicitly, but because it should be common sense.
Rather than say, “Oh shit this will look bad.” They said, “Oh let’s just change it for Germany.”
I am saying that this Germany scenario occurs all the time. That is SOP. Very often, a marketing team discovers that “oh, this copy is considered Nazi imagery in Germany” even though it is entirely innocuous to any other culture, so they alter it for just the German market. So, because they are so used to not looking further into common false positives (inspecting the situation and determining if that might actually be Nazi imagery elsewhere as well), it is possible that this is what happened here. Someone may have figured this was just another false positive like all the other German false positives and just sent off a culturally sensitive version like they always do with false positives. This situation might just indicate that they need to make it SOP to investigate every false positive and question if they might actually be genuine.
Again, I do think it was intentional Nazi imagery for other reasons. I am just saying that the “Germany” reason isn’t a valid reason because that situation could have potentially been incompetence instead of malice. Even their corpospeak explanation of the situation complies with this possibility.
