Fonts are an absolute joke. Foundries must be run by the mafia at this point.
Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
71–80 of 213 posts
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#72Ah Monotype. Knew before reading the article it would be them. Their whole MO is buying up smaller type foundries, massively increasing the licensing fees and shaking down the previous customers. They send in auditors, demand to see traffic data and threaten fines. Happened to me twice now. Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. However Monotype’…
Google fonts has about 2000 fonts with about 8000 total variations I believe. I pretty much refuse to believe that you can’t find the font you want there. Finding it is the hard part.
I saw multiple font discussions today. These are just variations on letters, there was some interesting stuff in the past but it’s over now. There should be no ip left, just remove all protections. The world won’t be worse off.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#73that fucking robbery
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!".
Here's my anecdotal, completely unfounded theory.
Serif fonts were used in print media for ages but when computers came around sans serif became significantly more popular as no longer was there the legibility concern with dodgy pigment applicators etc.
People started to switch to sans serif fonts more and more and would seek out an alternative to the widely defaulted Times New Roman in early days. They'd open the alphebetically sorted fonts list and what did they see at the top?
Arial.
Keep in mind, when personal computing started out, we didn't have a ton of fonts packaged with the system to start with. Just a handful. Arial has pretty much always been there.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#75Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What do I feel like custom font generation is one thing AI could be really good at Probably because you're wrong. Anybody can make a font, making a good font is a highly under appreciated art form.
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.
Ask the models to create vector SVGs and you'll understand how far off they are on shapes.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#77Ah Monotype. Knew before reading the article it would be them. Their whole MO is buying up smaller type foundries, massively increasing the licensing fees and shaking down the previous customers. They send in auditors, demand to see traffic data and threaten fines. Happened to me twice now. Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. However Monotype’…
Google fonts has about 2000 fonts with about 8000 total variations I believe. I pretty much refuse to believe that you can’t find the font you want there. Finding it is the hard part. I saw multiple font discussions today. These are just variations on letters, there was some interesting stuff in the past but it’s over now. There should be no ip left, just remove all protections. The world won’t be worse off.
When I select 'Japanese' on fonts.google.com the number of fonts drops from 1901 families down to 50. Selecting 'Hiragana and Katakana' raises the number to 81.
That's still a lot of fonts, but it's not 2000. I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
And after digging through the comments... Yup it's private equity again. PE buyouts should be considered criminal fraud.
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It is a nasty aftereffect of the copyright law expanding like cancer.
I would gladly go back to the older 14+14 system, even though I have nontrivial income from royalties. In my opinion, copyright should motivate people to create new things, not one cash cow that they then will milk for eternity.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#79Are 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,…
Noto Sans comes in SC, TC, HK, CJK JP and CJK KR variants. There's no Noto Serif for CJK characters, nor does Deja Vu support them.