How GOG's Newsletter Failed Its Quality Check—and What It Reveals

On June 5, 2024, GOG—the CD Projekt-owned digital store for PC games that sells titles without copy-protection software—sent a promotional email to about half its subscriber base advertising The End of the Sun, a Slavic mythology game. The newsletter contained symbols that closely resembled the Black Sun (Sonnenrad), a sun wheel design that was adopted by the Nazi regime and is now recognized worldwide as neo-Nazi imagery. GOG halted the email campaign when the problem was discovered internally, but the damage was already done: roughly 50% of subscribers had already received it.

The company quickly issued a public apology and acknowledged multiple failures in its production and review process that should have caught the error before the email went out.

What Went Wrong in the Newsletter

The game being promoted, The End of the Sun, is designed with authentic Slavic historical imagery, including runic symbols and other traditional designs. That detail is important—the game's team was not at fault. The problem was GOG's execution.

According to reporting, the symbols in the newsletter resembled the Black Sun, or Sonnenrad—a twelve-spoke wheel adapted from ancient sun imagery. In the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi leadership, particularly Heinrich Himmler's SS organization, incorporated this symbol into their regime's visual identity. It became so associated with Nazism that it is now banned outright in several European countries. When the symbol appeared in a commercial email, subscribers and observers immediately recognized the problem, regardless of where the game's source material came from.

The Cascade of Failures

GOG's apology detailed not a single mistake but several errors stacked on top of each other. Any one of them caught in time might have prevented the email from being sent.

The runes were arranged incorrectly in the newsletter design. The wrong game logo was used. The email was never tested on mobile phones—an oversight that matters because the vast majority of people now open promotional emails on their phones rather than computers. But the most significant failure was this: GOG's quality assurance team in Germany had raised concerns about the content, but that feedback never made it to the other regional teams who handle different languages and markets. The signal existed. The system did not pass it along.

That last problem reveals something important about organizational structure. The team that should have recognized the risk actually did their job. But the process around them failed to route that alert to the right places. It is not a failure of knowledge—it is a failure of communication and workflow.

GOG caught the issue before all emails went out, but by that point roughly half their subscriber list had already received them. The company has not disclosed how many total subscribers that represents.

Why This Matters Beyond GOG

The underlying problem here is not unique to GOG. Any large organization that markets products across many countries and languages faces similar pressures. When you run promotional campaigns in dozens of regional markets, processes tend to develop shortcuts and workarounds over time. Design assets get reused. Quality review is rarely equally thorough in every language version. And tight deadlines—especially around new game launches or sales events—compress the time available to check everything carefully.

We have seen this pattern before with other major platforms that shipped content quickly without adequate regional review. The consequences depend on how sensitive the content is. Nazi symbolism sits at the extreme end of that sensitivity spectrum, which is why this incident drew such immediate and widespread attention.

What This Means for GOG

GOG has built its reputation over years as a different kind of game store than Steam. It sells games without digital rights management (copy protection), curates its catalog carefully, and emphasizes independent and classic titles. That identity creates a relationship with subscribers that carries real weight. A mistake like this does not erase that goodwill immediately, but it does cost credibility—credibility that takes consistent follow-through to rebuild.

The apology itself handled the right elements: it named the specific failures, did not blame the game's source material as an excuse, and committed to changing how newsletters are reviewed. Whether those promised changes actually happen and work as intended will become clear over time. The next wave of promotional campaigns for unconventional or niche titles will be the practical test.

One detail is worth preserving: The End of the Sun is a legitimate, well-regarded game made by developers drawing on real Slavic history. Its creators bear no responsibility for how GOG's marketing team handled the promotional materials. That distinction deserves to stay clear as people understand what happened.

The more meaningful observation is that the German QA team spotted the risk but the organization did not act on that information. GOG needs to fix not just how it visually reviews content, but how it routes warnings from the teams most likely to recognize culturally or legally sensitive issues. Better visual screening alone will not solve the underlying problem if regional expertise stays isolated.

Looking Forward

GOG has said it will revise its newsletter review process to catch errors earlier. The real test will be whether that revision is a genuine structural change—one that makes regional feedback a mandatory checkpoint rather than optional input—or something less substantial. Subscribers and observers will be able to judge by watching how the next set of high-volume promotional campaigns are handled, especially for games with unconventional or culturally complex imagery.

The gaming industry sends enormous amounts of promotional content through email, social media, and in-app messages every day, often under tight deadlines. The GOG incident is a clear lesson in what can happen when regional expertise and local insight are kept separate from central decision-making. Nearly every stage of this process had a chance to prevent the outcome. The fix is making sure the next time, one of those stages actually does.