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

gamesindustry.biz

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

#81

Post by Aachen »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #66
cyphar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Alternately, imagine if all text in your favorite game was IP owned by some random third party that could ruin everything one or two years down the line. 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.

Sounds like one should be able to get a long way if you put down, say, 2 years of the new license fee and then never have to pay again

I guess the trouble is that game companies can't really band together and pool money to make a good font since the point is to look unique, so this only works for the largest studios. Otoh, at least for now, the smaller ones might stay below the 25k user limit

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

#82

Post by Aachen »

martijnvds wrote: post #46
Aeolun wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Minecraft as an example of desirable graphic properties :D

It sure has its style and I stand by what I've always maintained about gameplay being infinitely more important than polished graphics, but that does sound ironic to my ears!

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

#83

Post by viraptor »

proc0 wrote: post #67

I never thought about this but JP fonts probably need thousands of glyphs? Creating new fonts must be brutal.

Creating new (really good looking) fonts must be brutal

Many symbols are collections of other symbols raised and placed more or less on a grid. You could cover quite a lot with not that many created glyphs. Now, actually making it good quality and properly adjusted... that could take years...

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

#84

Post by brailsafe »

exmadscientist wrote: post #41
jjmarr wrote: post #17

Earlier 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!".

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

Not true at all. For instance, Arial was/is typically used as the fallback font for Windows users visiting a website that relied on system sans-serif fonts, while Helvetica shipped with OSX and would be prioritized for those lucky users.

Arial would be chosen by Windows users as good enough because they were already locked in a prison of bad design and terrible typeface rendering anyway, and didn't have other sensible options installed by default.

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

#85

Post by xigoi »

jacobn wrote: post #57
rvnx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

The fonts seem to have little Unicode coverage (no Greek letters for example), which is one thing that I wouldn’t expect an AI to have a problem with.

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

#86

Post by omnimus »

mattkevan wrote: post #58

Ah 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’…

It's not Monotype but HGGC, private equity firm from Palo Alto that has bought Monotype and every other type foundry they can get their hands on. They likely have strategy to completely corner the market and then turn things up.

But as I wrote here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973261#45977078 Besides open source fonts there still are stable high quality independent foundries that are safe to use as they would already be bought. (from comment above “Mostly swiss/european companies likes of Grilli type, Lineto, Dinamo, Klim type, Florian Karsten, Swiss typefaces… companies with often just few employees.”)

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

#87

Post by omnimus »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #60
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…

Looks like it's Oracle licensing strategy, not a mistake.

It's Palo Alto equity firm HGGC so you are totally right it's Oracle playbook not a mistake.

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

#88

Post by yupyupyups »

michaelbuck wrote: post #21
conradev wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging#Consolidation... Fontworks’ team, type inventory, IP, technology, and services will join global type specialist Monotype–Monotype’s first acquisition in Japan. https://www.monotype.com/company/press-release/fontworks-pla...

Additional anecdote about Monotype pricing policies: https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1jqqlm6/mon...

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Reddit is weird these days. I'm not even sure how this is related to fonts.

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

#89

Post by eloisant »

omnimus wrote: post #86
mattkevan wrote: post #58

Ah 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’…

It's not Monotype but HGGC, private equity firm from Palo Alto that has bought Monotype and every other type foundry they can get their hands on. They likely have strategy to completely corner the market and then turn things up. But as I wrote here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973261#45977078 Besides open source fonts there still are stable high quality independent foundries that are safe to use as they wou…

Oh my god, private equity firms are such life-sucking vampires.

Buy a great company, suck as much cash as they can before discarding the empty carcass.

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

#90

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

akdor1154 wrote: post #49
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,…

Every variant is a different font. IMO Han unification is one of the greatest failures of Unicode.
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