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Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

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Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#41

Post by exmadscientist »

jjmarr wrote: post #17
teraflop wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're making a work of art (such as a game) you don't just want any old font, you want one that serves a particular aesthetic purpose. If you've picked a typeface, and designed other UI elements that look good in conjunction with it, but suddenly that typeface becomes unaffordable, then you have to do some work to find an alternative that's still acceptable. In particular, game UI tends to be designed around th…

Part of the reason Arial is so dominant is because it's proportioned the same as Helvetica, meaning it can be swapped in to avoid licensing fees without affecting document layout.

I don't think any designer has cared about that in the last 30 years. Perhaps not ever.

Arial is popular because people see it and say "good enough!".

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#42

Post by kouteiheika »

Shank wrote: post #13

The lack of competence from companies that acquire Japanese companies, and then fail to even price things in yen or offer support packages that cater to Japanese customers is really something. It's one thing to raise the price on a license, but it's another thing to not even support local pricing (you can even do this dynamically) or try to meet users halfway. The thing that companies like this do not understand is t…

> The lack of competence from companies that acquire Japanese companies, and then fail to even price things in yen or offer support packages that cater to Japanese customers is really something.

In general I don't think it's just that. Pretty much all font foundries have... insufferable business models.

I once emailed one Japanese foundry asking to license one of their font to use on my website. I wanted a perpetual, one-time license to use on a single website, and I wanted to store and serve their font from my server. I was even prepared to pay low four figures for it.

Nope. I was told I need to pay a subscription fee, and I need to use their crappy Javascript to serve it. Okay, if you don't want my money then I'm not going to insist.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#43

Post by sparqlittlestar »

lurk2 wrote: post #34

Why would a company pay for fonts?

1. Because fonts are works of art and any artist deserves to be paid. 2. Because there may not be a freely licensed font with the right aesthetics 3. Especially because Japanese fonts require much more work than Latn fonts, with not some hundred glyphs (a-zA-Z0-9 and punctuation), but with thousands upon thousands of glyphs

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#45

Post by cyberrock »

deadbabe wrote: post #2

What do I feel like custom font generation is one thing AI could be really good at but so far I haven’t seen anything of that sort? Seems like you could easily prompt whatever vibe you’re looking for in a font, why even bother buying commercial fonts at that point. Am I just not looking in the right places?

Creating a CJK font seems exactly the kind of thing they're still bad at, and the results I got from just trying it on Gemini, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek pretty much confirmed that. This is like the whole "draw a clock" challenge except there are 2000+ common clocks and a bajillion more obscure ones, and regional differences like the grass radical[1]. You'd probably need to start from teaching it the principles like radicals, stroke weight, etc. as if it were a human calligrapher.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_140#Variant_forms

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#46

Post by martijnvds »

Aeolun wrote: post #8
Aachen wrote: post #6

Are there no fonts that are open for anyone to use, like what does a Linux distribution ship? Surely those can render Japanese characters? Maybe it's because it's a dumb question but the article doesn't really set the stage for me why it's an issue that 1 font licensing company raised its prices. I guess they must have a monopoly or else this change isn't commercially viable (the article just says "one of the country…

There’s the unifont, but it’s not really something you’d want to ship in a game. The main focus is apparently on making sure every character is covered, not that it looks nice.

Minecraft ships it I think?

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#47

Post by Towaway69 »

sparqlittlestar wrote: post #43
lurk2 wrote: post #34

Why would a company pay for fonts?

1. Because fonts are works of art and any artist deserves to be paid. 2. Because there may not be a freely licensed font with the right aesthetics 3. Especially because Japanese fonts require much more work than Latn fonts, with not some hundred glyphs (a-zA-Z0-9 and punctuation), but with thousands upon thousands of glyphs

[flagged]

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#48

Post by rvnx »

kouteiheika wrote: post #42
Shank wrote: post #13

The lack of competence from companies that acquire Japanese companies, and then fail to even price things in yen or offer support packages that cater to Japanese customers is really something. It's one thing to raise the price on a license, but it's another thing to not even support local pricing (you can even do this dynamically) or try to meet users halfway. The thing that companies like this do not understand is t…

> The lack of competence from companies that acquire Japanese companies, and then fail to even price things in yen or offer support packages that cater to Japanese customers is really something. In general I don't think it's just that. Pretty much all font foundries have... insufferable business models. I once emailed one Japanese foundry asking to license one of their font to use on my website. I wanted a perpetual,…

Soon they are going out of business anyway since they will be replaced by generative AI (which will look the same)

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#49

Post by akdor1154 »

Aachen wrote: post #6

Are there no fonts that are open for anyone to use, like what does a Linux distribution ship? Surely those can render Japanese characters? Maybe it's because it's a dumb question but the article doesn't really set the stage for me why it's an issue that 1 font licensing company raised its prices. I guess they must have a monopoly or else this change isn't commercially viable (the article just says "one of the country…

Interested in tangent replies to this, even if such fonts are artistically unsuitable for games - are open source fonts OK for Japanese? I understand that Unicode denotes single characters for both Chinese and Japanese (and Korean outside of Hangul?) even though there are differences between how nations write these 'single' characters, so the result is a Unicode font will look like a Chinese font, or a Japanese font, but not both.

How do the big Unicode OSS fonts like Noto, Deja Vu deal with this?

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#50

Post by p0w3n3d »

This is something that happens currently all over the world. Yet another company thinks they can get away with steep price increase at the end of the year. People must understand that economy must be ecological. If you behave like a cancer and kill your host, you won't live forever

-- edit --

I'd add that companies always strive for more income. This is dead end. You cannot earn more without creating more. "Just add ai and convert to subscription" - this is current model. But, as Chris Rea sung, this ain't no technological breakdown, oh no, this is the road to hell

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