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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

#91

Post by oefrha »

jack1243star wrote: post #39
oefrha wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you don't know the CJK font market. AI assisted font design is nothing new and especially useful for CJK since there are so many glyphs. There are plenty of foundries openly advertising AI-assisted fonts, e.g. https://izihun.com/fontxiazai/ziti-2673.html Also, generating images and programs are basically orthogonal. AI could generate impeccable photorealistic images of clocks years ago, and they're much m…

Those fonts look awful in a hard to describe way. Font uncanny-valley? I feel like a barcode reader trying to OCR meaning out of ink blots.

Those fonts are completely indistinguishable from the average cartoon/artistic font from the 2000s which are definitely not created by AI. I don’t like most of them, but I don’t like most of the human-designed ones either. Plus AI-assisted fonts in CJK often means hand drawing a couple hundred characters, maybe more, then generating the thousands of remaining characters (I assume the current crop of SOTA models could change that, but these fonts have been going around for a while), so the odds are what you see in the samples are mainly or maybe even completely human-generated.

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

#92

Post by llama_drama »

gjadi wrote: post #63
otikik wrote: post #56

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.

Maybe not for the full japanese characters set, but for an existing game, they could do it for the subset of characters they are using.

I don't think that's practical, because the subset would still be quite large. I did a quick analysis of the Factorio localiization files and found more than 1200 unique characters

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

#93

Post by mattkevan »

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…

Some really good options there. I did a deep dive a while back looking for small, independent, mostly European type foundries. There’s an incredible range of talent out there.

Will never give Monotype and the like another penny.

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

#94

Post by rvnx »

adamsmark wrote: post #75
School-Cotton wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You can still make art for yourself. Admittedly Pre-AI, someone might have spammed their font business and received a similar frustrated response. Maybe it's more about the shilling?

There will always be a place for calligraphy, artisan, who place creativity, handcraft and art first.

You can see it like pizzas:

there will always be someone who actually makes these pizzas from scratch; grows his own tomatoes in his garden, does his own flour, does his own cheese, raises pigs, etc.

But these are exceptions, maybe 0.001% - it gets very very expensive, these people do it for passion and art, not for money or scale.

You need to pre-order your pizza weeks before, you will pay a lot and you are not sure what will be the final taste (hopefully tasty), and you buy a story and supports someone.

On the other end, you have companies like Gustavo Gusto who produce 100'000 pizzas a day.

Quality ingredients, great execution, convenient, immediate, available and cheaper than hiring someone.

The irony is that the expensive and slow small artisan may actually make a worse product, than something which has been battle-tested on millions of people and whose supply chain has been controlled end-to-end.

After all of that, the industrial fonts like Roboto are not that bad, and if the industrial people offer you to customize it in a couple of prompts, then this is the cherry on top.

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

#95

Post by Sardtok »

michaelt wrote: post #77
mchusma wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose you're counting the joyo kanji plus kana alphabets with diacritics. But the actual count of kanji is much higher, even if Japanese uses a relatively small number of characters for day-to-day writing.

Pretty much every native university student I met when I studied there, had passed the Kanji Kentei level 1 test. A certification of proficiency in around 6000 kanji.

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

#96

Post by omnimus »

adamsmark wrote: post #75
School-Cotton wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You can still make art for yourself. Admittedly Pre-AI, someone might have spammed their font business and received a similar frustrated response. Maybe it's more about the shilling?

It's not about the shilling. It's about death of quality. As society we are self-destructing our culture using trash AI copies. It doesn't matter if it's fonts, code, movies or illustrations. Look at that service - the fonts are shit to meh but they are free. Corpo managers will of course want to squeeze every drop so they will push for free - especially as the AI gets close. So instead of allowing someone obsessive to produce highest quality output they can… we stop this by using stolen copy. In this can only lead to wiping any concepts of quality in our society while also robbing the people producing the quality work.

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

#97

Post by anal_reactor »

asimovDev wrote: post #62
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

I grew up in russia and every localized game always had godawful ugly thin fonts. I would always watch foreign gameplay videos with jealousy cause they had beautiful latin fonts. 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 pro…

I remember that PES6 was the only PES to get Polish translation. The start screen wouldn't render correctly because the font was missing the glyph Ś.

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

#98

Post by Tor3 »

mchusma wrote: post #72
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’…

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.

mchusma - the article specifically mentioned that this is about Japanese fonts, and being able to use fonts which look the same as they used to, in the games in question. And that getting other fonts is a) time consuming, b) needs testing, c), and if they look different they're talking about having to re-brand the whole game(s) in question. A big PITA, in any case. They're aware that it's possible to find an alternative, it's just that this is not easy to do quickly, and quickly enough to avoid the $20k penalty.

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

#99

Post by HPsquared »

otikik wrote: post #56

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.

This does sound like a perfect use case for "AI" tools however. It's literally style transfer.

Edit: though maybe grounds for a "rounded corners" style lawsuit, given the business style of the folk we are dealing with here.

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

#100

Post by magios »

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…

unifont has cjk support, bitmap fonts work just fine for the integer domain. been using unifont system and app wide for some integer number of years now. i believe the only app that i use that does not have unifont is the game rimworld, but i haven't investigated to see if there's any fix for that. for qt based apps i believe you have to use the environmental variable QT_FONT_DPI=128 or something similar, where the 128 is double the DPI, which may be some bug that i got around that may be fixed now
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