GOG sent a promotional newsletter on June 5th containing symbols associated with the Nazi SS. The email was for 'The End of the Sun,' a fantasy game rooted in Slavic mythology. The offending symbols were Slavic runes, including the Sowilō rune meaning 'sun,' used intentionally for thematic accuracy.
The problem was technical and organizational. On certain platforms, including mobile phones, font rendering converted the Slavic runes into characters visually identical to SS insignia. GOG cited three compounding failures: miscommunication with their German QA team, inconsistent font rendering across platforms, and being understaffed during a bank holiday.
The full story is worth reading for the breakdown of how a chain of mundane process failures produced a maximally bad outcome. The font rendering detail is the crux, and the specifics of how it went undetected through QA explain a lot about how localization and review pipelines can collapse under ordinary staffing pressures.
[READ ORIGINAL →]