Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gamesindustry.biz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 213 posts

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

#101

Post by cbolton »

teraflop wrote: post #9
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…

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…

Why don't they pay someone to make a very similar looking font? Font design is not protected by copyright, and most fonts are also not protected by design patents as far as I know.

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

#102

Post by SSLy »

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…

it's because whatever font stack to directx renderer middleware game engines were using was usually only developed for the latin script, probably the lowest common denominator of no diacritics either.

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

#103

Post by thaumasiotes »

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’…

> Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly.

Sure, if you need a custom font, you can pay someone to create it.

Once it exists, the creator has already been compensated fairly.

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

#104

Post by eloisant »

cbolton wrote: post #101
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…

Why don't they pay someone to make a very similar looking font? Font design is not protected by copyright, and most fonts are also not protected by design patents as far as I know.

Because there are more than 2000 characters in Japanese, making a font is a huge work.

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

#105

Post by eloisant »

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…

It's the same for some non-Japanese games who don't take the time to think it through, worse case scenario is when they use Chinese fonts.

Because Japanese and Chinese characters are slightly different, but Unicode decided to unify them under the same codes....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs

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

#106

Post by RobotToaster »

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.

> These are just variations on letters, there was some interesting stuff in the past but it’s over now.

I'm normally the last person to defend up, but there's some interesting stuff going on with svg fonts. I'm pretty sure there's only one or two true monoline fonts for instance.

Also high quality ligature support is still not that common.

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

#107

Post by thaumasiotes »

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,…

> 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.

This is "Han Unification", a terrible idea from early in the development of Unicode. The idea was so bad that the affected glyphs are now also given always-Chinese and always-Japanese Unicode points, making it possible to, for example, compare a Chinese character to a Japanese character in the same document.

But the fix exists. You can specify that you have no idea what you're trying to write by coding it as U+76F4 (直). Or you can specify a Chinese character by coding U+FAA8 (直). Or you can specify a Japanese one by coding U+2F940 (直). There isn't actually a reason you'd want U+76F4 - it's just a dead, useless unicode point - but we can observe here that my default font doesn't include a glyph for either U+FAA8 or U+2F940 even though U+FAA8 is by definition identical to U+76FA (since this is a Chinese font).

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

#108

Post by amake »

yorwba wrote: post #79
akdor1154 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There's no Noto Serif for CJK characters

Yes there is: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+JP

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

#109

Post by tecleandor »

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]

No thanks. Not only for the AI, but I've tried to write a little japanese and all the fonts appear blank.

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

#110

Post by eloisant »

brailsafe wrote: post #84
exmadscientist wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple decided to have a font as close as possible to print, at the cost of a more fuzzy render on the low DPI screens of the time.

Microsoft decided to have a font adapted to computer screens, with characters that match the screen grid better for a crisp result.

It's not really "bad design and terrible typeface", but different choices with each their pro and cons.

Of course it's different now with high DPI screens.

Post reply on HN