• napoleonsdumbcousin ( napoleonsdumbcousin@feddit.org ) English
    129·
    2 months ago

    Just a quick reminder that discs that you burn yourself at home do degrade pretty quickly, much faster than pressed discs. I personally have had burned discs that failed after approx. 6 years. It can happen even faster if you use low-quality discs. Even pressed discs can fail after 20 years if you are unlucky.

    Using 2 big HDDs (2 for redundancy) full of your installers might be safer in the long run and also easier to manage and backup.

    https://digital-archivist.com/how-long-do-dvds-last-and-cds

    • deft ( deft@lemmy.wtf ) English
      10·
      2 months ago

      Didn’t they instantly flag that? It was for some slavic game thing and all of those symbols are rooted in cultures long gone that nazis appropriated.

      • Doug ( Doug@piefed.social ) English
        23·
        2 months ago

        The symbol alone was OK, but they doubled it to read SS, and they didn’t send it to Germany; which means it was 100% intentional and not just a little oopsie.

        • deft ( deft@lemmy.wtf ) English
          19·
          2 months ago

          That’s because the German team flagged it.

          I don’t think it’s a good look but to decry they’re nazis for an email showing runic alphabet and slavic symbols doesn’t exactly trigger me too hard. It really sounds like someone fucked up.

          People out there still buying Bayer products and they genuinely were part of the Holocaust, a huge part of it. Ford, Volkswagen, etc.

          • hzl ( hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone ) English
            12·
            2 months ago

            There’s a world where someone uses a kolovrat or a sigel without intending to relate them to the Nazis. There is not a world where they use both a kolovrat and two sigels in a row and don’t know what it means. Maybe someone at GOG didn’t catch on, but the devs knew what was up.

            • deft ( deft@lemmy.wtf ) English
              6·
              2 months ago

              So we think the entire dev team, marketing team and anyone else involved had a whole meeting and plan to do this? What’s the end goal?

              Hanlon’s Razor dude. Going to need more for me to decry the Nazi label onto someone.

              • Doug ( Doug@piefed.social ) English
                3·
                2 months ago

                no goal beyond having a laugh at triggering people with nazi symbols; same as NYT did with their Nazi symbol crossword.

                The fact the apology didn’t make an effort to say something like “those responsible have been sacked” and instead said something like “nazis shouldn’t have all the Nordic symbols” told me all I needed to know about their workplace environment and the types that work there. no bueno for me.

                Not saying I’m boycotting them, because ethical consumerism is near impossible, but I’m not going to rally behind them or applaud them for anything like they’re to be championed sans asterisk.

                • deft ( deft@lemmy.wtf ) English
                  2·
                  2 months ago

                  I really doubt that’s even what happened here. I don’t think the people who run the company, any member of the marketing team or even anyone important sat down in a meeting to decide this for a fuckin laugh.

                  It’s probably some dumb AI, some intern or some individual fuck or just a genuine mistake. The character doesn’t even render the same on every platform. Maybe if there was more than this one event I’d be more interested but I really think this is goofy.

                  Especially because I know most people crying about it have definitely owned something Microsoft or IBM related and don’t even consider it.

                  Most people only care cause they read an article about it and are genuinely looking for any excuse to hop on their high horse and act high and mighty.

                  It’s silly. I bet you can get most Wolfenstein games on GOG. We gonna be mad now because that game has Nazi symbolism in it? C’mon.

          • flying_sheep ( flying_sheep@lemmy.ml ) English
            8·
            2 months ago

            No matter who flags “you platformed Nazi shit”, you immediately escalate this, halt all outgoing communication until you got a lid on this and fix whatever led to that happening.

            • deft ( deft@lemmy.wtf ) English
              3·
              2 months ago

              Maybe if it was more severe. But like I said in another comment, what did they accomplish here? Is there some huge master plan? Did they all sit down and come up with a plot to transform us all into nazis? What’s the end game here?

              Hanlon’s Razor dude, likely it was something stupid that happened.

              There is no benefit for them doing this. And doing what you suggested would be some serious pandering for a bunch of unserious pearl clutchers who likely own hanes clothing, buy coke products and drive fords without a second thought of how it has affected the planet and other humans. The only reason most people care about this is because the news told them to or they read it on reddit. Unserious people.

              • flying_sheep ( flying_sheep@lemmy.ml ) English
                8·
                2 months ago

                Are you kidding me? They sent Nazi symbols to users.

                Not just “nordic symbols that happen to be used in Nazi symbology” but an unmistakable sequence of symbols only used by Nazis (and people teaching others about Nazis).

                Also how are you supposed to learn about anything if not the news lol? What weird argument is that supposed to be?

                • deft ( deft@lemmy.wtf ) English
                  2·
                  2 months ago

                  And now we’re all nazis for it, they sure got us 🙄

                  Have you never heard the revolution will not be televised? The government will not educate you about their own wrongdoings? I’m pretty sure most of us here treat all news with a little skepticism which is why most are here and stopped using reddit.

                  Sorry someone sending an email with some symbols as the tagline isn’t enough for me to get out the noose and piss my pants.

    • NotSteve_ ( NotSteve_@lemmy.ca ) English
      51·
      2 months ago

      Yeah I’m still pretty concerned about that whole event but it seems like everyone has just forgotten about it.

      I could have forgiven the initial email as a rogue nazi intern but their official response being “we made sure not to send it to Germans and its on you all for seeing nazi symbols as nazi symbols” is pretty fucking problematic. Also before anyone defends them as just being pagan symbols, the ones they chose to use were both modern creations by nazi germany

      For anyone who’s not up to date: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-nazi-runes-to-its-followers/

      • SatyrSack ( SatyrSack@quokk.au ) English
        10·
        2 months ago

        I definitely agree that using those innocuous Unicode characters in the way they did was someone’s subtle attempt at evoking Nazi imagery, but the whole Germany part of this story is meaningless. Germany is known for having excessive language restrictions, to the point where every marketing department has their standard library of phrases and whatnot to not use in Germany. They are used to making substitutions for the German market to swap out genuinely innocuous phrases simply because they have a different connotation in Germany or whatever. As far as we can tell, that was just yet another piece of marketing material that went through some automated regex filter for German subscribers and no one thought twice about it after seeing that fact.

        • chortle_tortle ( chortle_tortle@mander.xyz ) English
          26·
          2 months ago

          From their reddit post in trying to cover up:

          … I also recognize that placing two such runes next to each other could create an unfortunate association with symbols used by the Nazi regime. This was noticed before distribution, and out of respect for local sensitivities, the material was not sent to the German community.

          They knew and actively chose to not send it to the country that criminalizes Nazi imagery. To me the Germany stuff is the most damning part.

          • NotSteve_ ( NotSteve_@lemmy.ca ) English
            18·
            2 months ago

            Yeah 100%. Their response to the event is pretty much where all of my feelings come from on the subject. They explicitly state they knew they were releasing literal nazi iconography and then explicitly chose to put it out where it wouldn’t get them in legal trouble.

            Not only that but IIRC they actually changed the original game dev’s marketing material to use the symbols without the devs even knowing.

            It’s all pretty fucking damning and it makes me incredibly sad

        • VeganCheesecake ( VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English
          1·
          2 months ago

          That was about their German language newsletter though. They have separate, localised newsletters for several markets, which I’d assume are manually translated. Also, as a native German speaker, I really don’t think it’s all that different than other European language regions regarding sensitivities.

          • VitoRobles ( VitoRobles@lemmy.today ) English
            8·
            2 months ago

            Their marketing team was warned that there was some offense images and it would stir trouble in Germany.

            Rather than say, “Oh shit this will look bad.” They said, “Oh let’s just change it for Germany.”

            Do you not understand the root issue?

            • SatyrSack ( SatyrSack@quokk.au ) English
              2·
              2 months ago

              Rather than say, “Oh shit this will look bad.” They said, “Oh let’s just change it for Germany.”

              I am saying that this Germany scenario occurs all the time. That is SOP. Very often, a marketing team discovers that “oh, this copy is considered Nazi imagery in Germany” even though it is entirely innocuous to any other culture, so they alter it for just the German market. So, because they are so used to not looking further into common false positives (inspecting the situation and determining if that might actually be Nazi imagery elsewhere as well), it is possible that this is what happened here. Someone may have figured this was just another false positive like all the other German false positives and just sent off a culturally sensitive version like they always do with false positives. This situation might just indicate that they need to make it SOP to investigate every false positive and question if they might actually be genuine.

              Again, I do think it was intentional Nazi imagery for other reasons. I am just saying that the “Germany” reason isn’t a valid reason because that situation could have potentially been incompetence instead of malice. Even their corpospeak explanation of the situation complies with this possibility.

    • Dæmon S. ( dsilverz@catodon.rocks ) 
      2·
      2 months ago

      Hey, as a “pagan” (practitioner of a Left-Hand Path centered on Lilith) myself, I’d warn you not to commit to religious intolerance conflating paganism, which includes Rodnovery, a Slavic Native Faith likely the one depicted in the The End of the Sun game, with the shitty nazi dog whistle done at the sole discretion of GOG. The devs of the game made it clear that they had absolutely nothing to do with the infamous GOG newsletter and its nazi dog whistle. We pagans have nothing to do with shitty far-right bigotry.

      !pcgaming@lemmy.ca

  • onnekas ( onnekas@sopuli.xyz ) English
    24·
    2 months ago

    Pull out disc with a game from 10 years ago

    Installs just fine and launches

    “Connecting to online services…”

    “Timeout: Retry? Quit?”

    Huh?

    • Aceticon ( Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
      9·
      2 months ago

      It’s exactly GOG’s thing that games sold there can’t have any DRM, so this scenario is out. (Also, no disk with GOG games ;))

      Probably why you won’t find things like Red Dead Redeption II (PC) in GOG, since Rockstar wants to force you to register in their systems to get your sweet, sweet private info. (Curiously, the pirated version has no such anti-consumer crap)

      In my experience as a gamer for almost 4 decades, the most likely scenario with a really old game is that it simply won’t install or run in the OS version or even hardware that you have now, though give it enough time and somebody out there will have created an emulator or adaptor layer for it (like DOSBox).

      But yeah, any game from the Phone-home DRM generation which isn’t bought from a seller which has No DRM policy (which only GOG has, as far as I know - even itch.io doesn’t have a No DRM policy) will almost certainly have an artificially created end-of-life that has nothing to do with the OS or hardware you have being too new for the game.

  • Axolotl ( Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it ) English
    15·
    2 months ago

    If only they would post more stuff on Bluesky or even use Mastodon instead of TwitterX

    (Yes, i am aware they have a bluesky profile but they post less stuff on there, it seems)

  • deft ( deft@lemmy.wtf ) English
    9·
    2 months ago

    Anyone ITT saying GOG is run by Nazis because some AI or intern or something used slavic symbols on an email newsletter better not use any of the following brands:

    Volkswagen, Porsche, BMW, Bayer, IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase, Ford, General Motors, Chanel, Fanta, Shein, Temu, Zara, H&M, Nike, Adidas, Puma, Gucci, Prada, Dior, Armani, Versace, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Louis Vuitton, L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, McDonald’s, KFC, Tyson Foods.

    If you’ve ever bought any of these brands or even used one of their products once you’re also a Nazi, you exploit humans and animals and should be blacklisted from all jobs probably even killed or something idk.

    There’s probably more brands. Comment them as you see fit!

    /s

  • Einhornyordle ( Einhornyordle@feddit.org ) English
    6·
    2 months ago

    I’m amazed that noone here is complaining about the fact that the offline installer for the product you paid for contains ads. Yes, offline ads that do not track you and only for other games on their plattform, but still ads. Not the worst thing in the world, I know, but still annoying.

  • Mwa ( Mwa@thelemmy.club ) English
    5·
    2 months ago

    I still don’t like their AI stance.

    • can’t you just copy the game files to another engine, Only Buy non steam DRM games or copy some DLLS that makes the game playable on Steam(not sure if this is fine to do) ?