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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

#141

Post by Cloudef »

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’…

Apparently they are planning to create their own machine learning model with all the font data they have gathered.

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

#143

Post by oliwarner »

dryark wrote: post #114

The Monotype pricing change is brutal, but there’s a workaround. Derive new Japanese font families directly from public-domain sources. I’ve been working on doing exactly that. Reconstructing clean vector glyphs from old metal-type Japanese books. The quality of those prints is surprisingly high, and they include thousands of kanji in consistent style. With some new technological innovations and a reasonable amount o…

Indeed. Scan a book in public domain, feed into an online font generation service, pay somebody to clean it up.

A few hours later, you have a font you can use how you like. Is it as good? Probably not, but it's much cheaper.

Edit: oh look https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127400

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

#144

Post by omnimus »

sdenton4 wrote: post #129
omnimus wrote: post #86

Earlier 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…

Those independent companies can be eventually bought by PE and turned into more bombs, though, right?

They indeed can but licensing on fonts from most companies is perpetual. Especially from the independent traditional ones. So its possible they might be bought in future but the new owner can't change license retroactively.

Also there is very high chance they already got offer from HGGC and simply refused it, because some similar notably independent type foundries got bought recently.

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

#145

Post by Towaway69 »

efilife wrote: post #123
Towaway69 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> If you're going to downvote my comment, then please also point out where my thinking is off. saying this never gets you a reply and always brings more downvotes. Tested it

So I've heard, but I've never tried it :)

There is always a first time!

Will It Blend?(TM)

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

#147

Post by dryark »

oliwarner wrote: post #143
dryark wrote: post #114

The Monotype pricing change is brutal, but there’s a workaround. Derive new Japanese font families directly from public-domain sources. I’ve been working on doing exactly that. Reconstructing clean vector glyphs from old metal-type Japanese books. The quality of those prints is surprisingly high, and they include thousands of kanji in consistent style. With some new technological innovations and a reasonable amount o…

Indeed. Scan a book in public domain, feed into an online font generation service, pay somebody to clean it up. A few hours later, you have a font you can use how you like. Is it as good? Probably not, but it's much cheaper. Edit: oh look https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127400

Yes. I did see that other article. No the process we are using is not using AI. We are not using OCR either. We are using computational geometry and forensics methodology. No flatbed scanners. No sheet fed scanners.

This isn't like anything ever done before. It's entirely different and higher quality than any result you can get through AI or OCR.

I do agree that detailed work is required to do it correctly and produced high quality results. I'm not offhandedly saying "just do these simple things and bam perfection."

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

#148

Post by _factor »

omnimus wrote: post #96
adamsmark wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I for one, love it. I want every single mega corporation using crappy AI to the point where we can identify and not buy their products. Leave the little guys alone, they don't print money yet; so have not much choice.

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

#150

Post by matheusmoreira »

eloisant wrote: post #89
omnimus wrote: post #86

Earlier 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.

Is there a point to these private equity firms besides sociopathically ruining everything? Why are they allowed to exist?
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