Why a Video Game Store's Email About a Game Sparked a Major Controversy

GOG is an online store where people buy PC games. On June 5, 2024, the company sent out a promotional email to advertise a game called The End of the Sun. That newsletter contained symbols that looked very similar to one historically used by Nazi Germany — a twelve-pointed sun wheel called the Black Sun or Sonnenrad. Roughly half of GOG's email subscribers received the message before the company caught the mistake and stopped sending it.

GOG later apologized publicly, saying several things went wrong in the process that should have caught this error before sending.

What Was in the Email

The End of the Sun is a game set in ancient Slavic mythology. It includes old Slavic symbols and runes to feel authentic to that setting. That matters for context — but it did not prevent serious mistakes in how GOG presented the game to customers.

The symbols in the newsletter looked like the Black Sun, a sun wheel design that the Nazi regime took and used widely. It appears in the mosaic floor of Wewelsburg Castle, built by the SS, and it has since become a symbol recognized around the world with neo-Nazi groups. Several European countries have banned it outright. When people saw these symbols in a commercial email from a major game store, they immediately noticed and reported it.

How Multiple Mistakes Stacked Up

GOG explained that not just one thing went wrong — several problems combined to let this email get sent out.

First, the company placed the runes incorrectly in the design. Second, it used the wrong logo for the game. Third, nobody tested how the email would look on a phone, even though most people now read emails on phones. Fourth, and most important, GOG's German quality-control team raised concerns about the symbols — but that feedback never got passed along to the teams in other countries who also reviewed the content.

That last point is striking. The German team did exactly what they should have done. The problem was that nobody made sure that important warning reached the other people making decisions. This is an organizational failure — the kind that should be fixable, but it is also embarrassing because it shows a broken process, not a lack of knowledge.

By the time GOG discovered the problem and stopped sending the email internally, about half of their subscriber list had already received it. The company did not say how many people that was.

The Bigger Picture

Any large company that sends different versions of marketing emails to customers in different countries faces this kind of pressure. Design files get copied and reused. Quality control is not always the same from one country to another. And when a game is being released or a sale is happening, there is urgency to get marketing out fast. None of this makes what happened acceptable, but it explains why it happens at scale.

The symbols GOG used sit at the highest level of sensitivity. This is precisely why the mistake got noticed immediately and spread widely. When you are dealing with imagery tied to genocide and dictatorship, the cost of a mistake is much higher than if the error had been about something else.

What It Means for GOG

GOG positions itself as different from its bigger competitor, Steam. The company emphasizes that games do not have digital rights management — a technical protection that prevents you from sharing or reselling — and that it works closely with its community. Because of that identity, its relationship with customers is especially important. A mistake like this does not destroy that relationship overnight, but it does cost the company trust that takes time to rebuild.

The apology GOG issued said the right things. It identified each specific failure. It did not blame the game developers or the game's source material as an excuse. And it promised to fix the review process. The real test will come when you see whether those fixes actually happen — the next time GOG promotes a game with unusual or unfamiliar imagery, you will be able to tell whether the company actually changed anything.

The game itself and the people who made it are not responsible for how GOG's marketing team handled things. That is an important distinction to keep in mind.

Looking at the details of what went wrong, the gap that stands out most is this: the German team flagged a problem, but nobody ensured that the flag got routed to the other reviewers who could have stopped the email. GOG needs to fix not just how carefully it looks at images, but how seriously it takes warnings from regional teams, especially teams in countries where these symbols are legally or culturally sensitive.

What Comes Next

GOG says it will change how it reviews promotional emails before they go out. It has not disclosed whether that means adding more people to check the work, using automated software to catch problems, or making sure regional teams have formal power to stop a campaign. That is what matters now. Readers and customers will have a clear way to judge whether the fix is real — watch what happens the next time GOG promotes a game with distinctive or unconventional imagery.

The video game industry sends out enormous amounts of promotional material through email and social media, often on tight deadlines. GOG's mistake is a concrete example of what goes wrong when different regional teams are kept separate instead of being connected. Nearly every step of this process could have caught the problem if people had been communicating properly.