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And after digging through the comments... Yup it's private equity again. PE buyouts should be considered criminal fraud.
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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 are quite a few open source or royalty free Japanese fonts (Google Fonts has 50[1]). But, as everyone else has mentioned, font usage in games (and most creative visual works) is more particular than just the bare minimum of "does it actually render the glyphs". Imagine if all text in your favourite game was all Times New Roman, it would make the game worse. [1]: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan
Now it's been years since I played a game in russian (almost a decade at this point I think) and I am so glad I don't have to put up with that anymore. Once in a while I see a screenshot from a cyrillic-using language translated game and probably half of the time the fonts are still bad.
I guess making a kanji font of your own is a big investment - thousands of symbols. With a western font you could wrap something up in a couple days if needed.
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 are quite a few open source or royalty free Japanese fonts (Google Fonts has 50[1]). But, as everyone else has mentioned, font usage in games (and most creative visual works) is more particular than just the bare minimum of "does it actually render the glyphs". Imagine if all text in your favourite game was all Times New Roman, it would make the game worse. [1]: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan
Perhaps it is time for more people to invest in royalty free IP? We are seeing a bit of a tragedy of the commons type of situation going down, right now.
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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!".
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Have you seen the output of LLMs lately? It's not perfect, but I bet that with enough refinements they can create "art" just as well.
The latest Nano Banana is pretty good, but it's not perfect yet. And many font use cases demand perfect. Maybe the next major update will be able to do it.
It wasn't long ago that we thought creativity and programming were safe from AI. Fonts are entirely within the realm of possibilities within 12 months.