Oh no, live service game companies have encountered another predator. How sad.
Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
131–140 of 213 posts
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd love to some deeper 60 minutes-like documentary about it. This perhaps might actually spark some legislation change
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#133Are 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…
If you are creating a work of art that depends on a continued business relationship with others, especially one without solid contracts that won't let them change pricing on you, then you have no one else to blame but yourself.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
2100 I took from Wikipedia:
> Japanese primary and secondary school students are required to learn 2,136 jōyō kanji as of 2010.[4] The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though this includes tens of thousands of characters only present in historical writings and never used in modern Japanese.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They might have passed some level of the kanken (kanji kentei) in school but it is unlikely to be level 1. The gap between level 1 and 2 is ridiculous.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle. The ~2000 is the official count taught in schools, but the actually "commonly" used number in literature is around ~3000. And you actually want more than that, because people's names can use weird kanji which are used nowhere else. On the other hand, the vast majority of kanji are actually composed of a limited set of "subc…
Although many kanjis can be algorithmically composed, manual adjustment of each character's shape is still necessary for production-grade fonts. For example, if you closely compare the 彳 radical between 徧, 行, and 桁, you'll notice subtle differences in width, stroke length, angle, and margin.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#137Are 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…
That is true for English games, but the vast majority of Japanese games use the same 3 or 4 fonts. Often they give the user the ability to change it. Or they just write menu systems in English if they want to stylise it.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 affect…
>There isn't actually a reason you'd want U+76F4 The fact that it was the only one that properly rendered for me is an actual reason.
And just think, that will be true about half the time!
You don't want U+76F4, you want buggy Asian fonts to be fixed.
(On second thought... did it render correctly for you? Did you check?)
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd love to some deeper 60 minutes-like documentary about it. This perhaps might actually spark some legislation change
Doubtful. The call is coming from inside the White House.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#140Ah 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’…
Using the name of these companies instead of the private equity gouging ghouls who see everything we use as a potential choke point for being a rent-seeking vehicles is silly.