GOG apologizes after newsletter includes Nazi symbols in subject line

A promotional email meant to spotlight The End of the Sun instead turned into a trust problem for GOG. The subject line included symbols tied to Nazi ideology, among them a Sonnenrad, a kolovrat and the SS double Siegrune, making the mistake far more serious than a stray graphic choice.

The newsletter went out on June 5, 2026, and GOG later apologized on X after the error spread. The company said it had stopped the mailout once it noticed the problem and that it would revise its review process to add more checks and catch mistakes earlier. That matters for GOG in particular, because the storefront has long presented itself as a curated, customer-first, DRM-free platform, a promise that depends on visible care and restraint in how games are presented to players.

The backlash was not only about the symbols themselves but about how many safeguards failed before the email left the building. GOG said it made several separate errors: it placed the runes incorrectly, used the wrong logo for The End of the Sun, failed to check how the message rendered on mobile devices, and did not carry feedback from German QA into other languages. One explanation also pointed to a rune rendering as the character on mobile, a technical detail that shows how a marketing mishap can slip across design, localization and platform presentation all at once.

The game at the center of the mess, The End of the Sun, is a first-person mystery-adventure set in a Slavic fantasy world. Its player character, the Ashter, is a Slavic fire mage who tracks mythical beings and supernatural forces, which explains why the campaign leaned on rune-like imagery in the first place. But the final result pushed that visual language into territory that was impossible to read as neutral.

Valve’s Steam platform also addressed the incident in a statement from The End of the Sun Team, saying the symbols appeared in a GOG newsletter featuring the game and that the issue was completely outside the developers’ control. The creators urged readers to look past the headlines and read the full statement. For GOG, though, the real damage was already clear: a storefront that sells itself on curation and care let a newsletter become a public test of its judgment, and that kind of failure lingers long after the mailout is pulled.