GOG, the DRM-free PC games storefront formerly known as Good Old Games, has issued an official apology on X for “an unfortunate visual association” that was spotted in its latest newsletter for the game The End of the Sun. Said “visual association” was between the Proto-Germanic Sowilō rune, which translates to “sun,” and the insignia used by the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary during World War II.
GOG’s newsletter for The End of the Sun went out sometime on June 5, and, well…it’s probably best that we start things off by just showing you what said email looked like.
jesus fucking christ https://t.co/QxMtbI5zfx pic.twitter.com/ulboCyZN6E
— rory (@vaurealis) June 5, 2026
Yes, that’s the double SS “Siegrune” symbol: the Nazi symbol designed by Walter Heck for use on Schutzstaffel corps’ uniforms. So, naturally, you may be wondering why GOG decided to blast everyone’s inboxes with a Nazi symbol last night, especially considering that The End of the Sun was developed by a Polish couple.
The creators of The End of the Sun were equally confused by this, as they stated in a comment on Reddit that they “don’t know why” GOG chose to use these symbols in the newsletter: “Really, we were also totally surprised when we saw the logo in the newsletter (the old logo) and the symbols next to the newsletter title. But we are in contact with GOG, and we believe this was like an AI recommendation to use those symbols, or something like that. We will ask GOG to just clarify things in the next newsletter.”
We are sorry for today’s newsletter.
We made a series of mistakes: We created an unfortunate visual association by placing the runes incorrectly, we used the wrong logo for The End of the Sun, we did not check the display of the newsletter on mobile devices – which came out…
— GOG.COM (@GOGcom) June 5, 2026
GOG stated in a post on X that it had “made a series of mistakes” in its newsletter for the game, but further clarified the reasoning behind accidentally emailing people Nazi symbols in a separate comment on Reddit: “What was displayed in several devices as doppelrune is out of our control. ᛋ was displayed as ϟ on several devices (might display for you differently here as well just letting you know).”
And, honestly, I believe it. I don’t think GOG were trying to pull off a giga-brained marketing plan to drum hype for a game by associating it with the Nazi party. Plus, considering that Walter Heck’s Siegrune was adapted from the Armanen sig rune designed by Guido von List, which was adapted from the original Sowilō rune, which was also an adoption of an Old Italic symbol…I find it pretty easy to believe that this was simply a case of GOG not checking if the symbol displayed correctly on certain devices.
The silliest part of this entire story is that The End of Sun’s developers stated in their post on Reddit that they “even explain that some ancient symbols were adapted by the Nazis” in the game. Kinda feel bad that they went to all that trouble, only to get caught in the crossfire of a marketing email that the developers had no control over.