With all the advancement in AI, shouldn't it be easier to create new fonts?
What a bold suggestion (pun intended). Wouldn't this draw the ire of the people who are up in arms about AI art supposedly stealing from artists?
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
#172Earlier 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
You may have heard of the 1987 Michael Douglas film "Wall Street"? Nothing has meaningfully changed since then.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#173What do I feel like custom font generation is one thing AI could be really good at but so far I haven’t seen anything of that sort? Seems like you could easily prompt whatever vibe you’re looking for in a font, why even bother buying commercial fonts at that point. Am I just not looking in the right places?
> What do I feel like custom font generation is one thing AI could be really good at Probably because you're wrong. Anybody can make a font, making a good font is a highly under appreciated art form.
I find that a “good” font is just whatever aesthetic people find popular, regardless of legibility.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What is a foundry?
A company that designs fonts. In the past they cast said fonts in metal to create movable type, a foundry is a place where metal is melted and cast into various forms. A font foundry was thus a place that made the type for printing presses.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a foundry?
A company that designs fonts. In the past they cast said fonts in metal to create movable type, a foundry is a place where metal is melted and cast into various forms. A font foundry was thus a place that made the type for printing presses.
But digital don't need one. A designer can do it. But why there is a market dominance through legal license in this regard?
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a foundry?
Sorry. Its name for a company that designs/distributes typefaces. It is a relic from past to call it this. In the past those companies were not only designing the typefaces but also manufacturing the physical matricies that were cast from metal. Its similar to how some people say leading to mean line height. Lead strips were used for space between lines of text.
Could it be true, the past companies, which held ownership on past products, still in a misconception about current world working, and overpricing products without considering the possible downfall?
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry. Its name for a company that designs/distributes typefaces. It is a relic from past to call it this. In the past those companies were not only designing the typefaces but also manufacturing the physical matricies that were cast from metal. Its similar to how some people say leading to mean line height. Lead strips were used for space between lines of text.
Could it be true, the past companies, which held ownership on past products, still in a misconception about current world working, and overpricing products without considering the possible downfall?
No, type designers want their art to be used. The type industry until recently has been a fairly friendly one as only designers really cared about it.
I think it’s more likely that vulture capitalists have discovered a matket that they can ruthlessly exploit, extracting every last shred of value without giving the slightest of shits about its long term sustainability.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#178The 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…
There used to be a meme of people thinking that the Japanese market was somehow inherently biased to domestic companies and unwilling to touch western products. When the reality is moreso that almost every western company that tries launching products in Japan assumes they can just crush the local competition and gets their shit kicked in for the trouble. The few companies that actually did well in Japan did so speci…
Companies that think they can just copy paste what works into another country usually fail.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#179Earlier 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…
You misunderstand my point.
My point is not that font substitution never happens (it quite clearly does). My point is that no print designer has ever thought "yes, I want Helvetica here, and sometimes we won't pay for Helvetica so sometimes it will look like Arial, and this is what I want". Probably back in the days of PostScript built-in fonts and font cartridges some people thought about that. But since TrueType and embedded fonts happened, I don't think a single designer has ever given a shit about these two fonts being metric-compatible instead of just, you know, picking one and designing with it.
Web design is its own beast and any web designer who wasn't designing, from day one, for different fonts possibly being used without even any regard for metric compatibility wasn't doing their job.
Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
#180Earlier 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.
Is there a point to these private equity firms besides sociopathically ruining everything? Why are they allowed to exist?
The point is short-term profits. The private equity firms vampirically suck a lot of money out of these companies as they ruin them, and keep the money they steal.
Arguably they shouldn't be allowed to exist: They use what seem to be loopholes in corporate law to run what are essentially embezzlement schemes. If a lone person runs an embezzlement scheme, that's possibly a felony charge. It shouldn't be a loophole that a company can do it just fine without repercussions when we know a lone individual doing it is a crime.
The two problems in why they are allowed to exist are enforcement and probably legislation. Legislation is needed to close any actual loopholes in the law and/or just explicitly say things like "Leveraged Buy Outs are illegal". Enforcement is getting courts to see this as a crime and prosecute it as such. They may be waiting for legislation before they feel confident enforcing it.
Fixing those problems is certainly easier said than done.
(ETA: Also some of this is classic Anti-Trust violations. Trusts/Monopolies are still illegal. Enforcement has been somewhat negligent in the US this century and some of these deals cross too many country borders making enforcement in general harder. In this specific case, a US private equity firm buying a Japanese company, who enforces the anti-trust issue, especially if the Japanese company was already a de facto local monopoly before joining the international one?)