Not a gamer or a European, but it's important to remember that none of these digital distribution platforms were ever your friends nor were they without problematic nature, especially so in the case of an entertainment medium that has attracted exceptionally reactionary and without decorum individuals.

Personally, I don't see why anyone would patronise these platforms in the age of piracy, abandonware, and FLOSS games. Unless we're talking about some super obscure game made by a not-famous person, shelling out money for a platform that will burn you one way or another in the future is just a bad move. Being nazi lovers on top of all these considerations should hopefully evoke some questions in the gaming crowd here.

anybody talking about "ancient slavic runes" or promoting any kind of runiform "ancient slavic symbols" should be considered either clueless and unserious at best or a fascist at worst. There is little to no evidence for any kind of pre-christian slavic writing, especially rune-type.

pseudoscientific theories professing otherwise are usually connected to ideas like the "nordic-arian" myth, "hyperborea," and other esoteric nazi nonsense, developed in part by far-right white émigrés and, in part, by literal card-carrying members of the german nazi party.

tragically, since the illegal dissolution of the ussr, the cia and other western intelligence agencies have been successfully pushing this idea, as well as other intellectual diarrhoea, into our public (sub-)consciousness, as well as even into some of our educational institutions, leading to some uninformed and clueless young people adopting those ideas as supposed fact, even if they haven't willfully embraced reactionary ideology.

to answer your question, though, those game developers clearly know what they're doing: they are nazis and just too cowardly to admit it openly!

Clear Nazi shit and they know it and are now trying to weasel out of the backlash. Not a coincidence that it's all Poles trying to justify it as "ancient slavic symbols". Most people who are obsessed with ancient runes and European pagan symbols are Nazis. Whether they're Germanic or Slavic makes very little difference

Ah, yes, "Ancient Slavic symbols", invented by Germans in 1920s.

If you ever see the proponents of "ancient Slavic something", remember that we barely even know anything about ancient Slavs, so such persons are either LARPers or nazis. This here uses the "ancient Slavic symbol" which is either sonnenrad, invented by Heinrich Himmler, or kolovrat, invented by Russian neonazi Alexei Dobrovolsky in 90's. Double sowilo runes don't require any comments i think except they aren't even Slavic but Germanic.

And btw all three are recognized in Poland as neonazi symbols so the dude spekaing about "Polish heritage" is simply a nazi, and not even particularly Polish flavoured since "traditional" Polish fash usually use national and catholic symbols.

20 minutes before I opened the thread someone made this comment in it that I think basically nails it: https://old.reddit.com/r/gog/comments/1txlz7z/hey_gog_wtaf/oq2dwrt/

I also seem to remember @AnarchoBolshevik@lemmygrad.ml writing up about the kolovrat and how it wasn't actually part of Slavic/Polish culture.

completely intentional on both parts, the devs and GOG. especially putting the symbols in the newsletter like they did. stacking them like this combines to a black sun which has no unicode because it's a symbol invented by a leading nazi in the late 30s, and there is NO reason whatsoever you would ever combine two S runes.

edit: also... pulling the newsletter from Germany specifically is very strange. They have laws on disseminating nazi symbols and GoG selling in the EU could get them in trouble for this headline. They said it had to do with "local sensitivities" which only confounds the issue. like, do they think the rest of europe likes the nazis except for germans? what's the explanation here? I also find it strange they had some random rep do damage control on the reddit thread alone instead of sending another newsletter. GoG is a pretty big store.

some people excusing this on reddit as if Poles are somehow too simple to know their own history with fascism (on both sides of it) but also good to see others are calling it out for what it is.

oh also there was never any point where Slavs used the runic alphabet and the historical links are tenuous (historical records would just as well describe the oracle bones in China), they used completely different alphabets by the 9th century that we have historical records of so no legitimate* idea why they would write their logo in runes lol. Germanic peoples are not Slavic... unless you really wanted there to be a link.

HAHAHAHAHA "as a pole i reject any uncharitable assumption this carried an extremist message"

AMAZING GOG STAFF

Many ways to say:"Sorry, we fucked up and were stupid". But no, "As a pole" and "my heritage" and "symbol with long history" are the first things to come up.

No one cares if they are poles or not. Where is the exclusive access to some heritage someone has? And then they didn't want to hurt the feelings of Germans so only they didn't receive this newsletter, how absurd is that?

You can make mistakes and many mistakes and fuck up. But their excuse is a rambling about heritage, ethnic identity and just symbols with long history.

Edit: Game creators are hilarious:

Some symbols are important for Polish culture. But from safety reason we never used it in our game like double S symbol.

And

(Btw svastika is still used today in India also so we understand your point of view)

And with this they outed them self as idiots.

It's extremely sus. The most charitable interpretation requires a hefty dose of political irresponsibilty and complete lack of self awareness and the worst is just straight up nazi shit. And considering the political landscape in Poland, the charitable interpretation becomes less and less likely.

I am so fucking tired of the ancient slavic symbols shtick especially when the symbol in question is of germanic origin and it was found like once in a ditch in silesia and the only people who actually care are the local fascists who want really really hard to be recognized as trve evropean aryans.

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