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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

#181

Post by aendruk »

martin_a wrote: post #166
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’…

The exact thing happened to us, too. Bought a font from a small foundry which then got acquired by Monotype two years down the road. They started questioning us and assumed we had pirated the font. Send them the old receipt and told them politely to fuck off. Never heard of them again luckily.

Is there any legal obligation to send them the old receipt? I’d be tempted to just let them waste their time on it more.

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

#182

Post by bramstein »

dryark wrote: post #156
afandian wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fascinating how different this challenge must be between Latin vs CJK. How do you match up the scans with unicode entities? Human supervision and/or OCR? To what extent is the breadth and quality of OCR the limiting factor? How do you define your target entity coverage?

Great questions — and you’re absolutely right that Latin vs. CJK is effectively two different universes in terms of reconstruction. 1. Latin vs. CJK differences Latin glyphs are structurally simple: limited stroke vocabulary, mostly predictable modulation, and relatively low topological variation. Once you can recover outlines and stroke junctions accurately, mapping to Unicode is almost trivial. That can be done wit…

Would love to hear or read more about this if it is public.

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

#183

Post by charcircuit »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #138
charcircuit wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?)

Every single time I reload the page the other characters are a broken rectangle, so experimentally it's 100% of the time I'll need that character. What I want is to not see a broken rectangle. One can't say that U+76F4 is useless when it clearly is serving a use for my computer.

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

#184

Post by venturecruelty »

halapro wrote: post #128
venturecruelty wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bereft way to produce beauty. "This grey slop is good enough, isn't it?" Christ, people, let's be human again.

My man, that battle is lost.

Only if you give up.

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

#185

Post by unsignedint »

Sardtok wrote: post #95
michaelt wrote: post #77

Earlier 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.

A typical font contains around 7,000 characters. In everyday use, you rarely touch all of them—most situations stay comfortably within the realm of jōyō kanji. However, there are many edge cases, especially with personal names, where the required characters fall outside the jōyō set. Fonts must be prepared to handle all of these possibilities, including the less common name kanji.

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

#186

Post by mattkevan »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #153
mattkevan wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a wild take. Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made. While it's possible to commission a custom font and many companies do eg. Apple, IBM, Airbnb, Bytedance, Vercel, Github, Mozilla etc. Some even make them open source. However it's not really a viable option for anyone other than the largest organisations as it's far more expensive and time-consuming than just getting a licence…

> Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made. Nothing wild about it. That's simply the reality of intellectual work. Only the first copy need ever be paid for. That is the true cost of creation. The cost of all subsequent copies is approximately $0 with 21st century computer technology. All intellectual work is information. All information is bits. All sequences of bits are numbers. All…

So if I wanted to write some notes or edit a photo you’re saying I should pay a team of developers to write custom code for me up front?

Literally nothing works like that.

There’s a huge difference between creative work and intellectual property, and a huge difference between the cost of creation and the cost of distribution.

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

#187

Post by motbus3 »

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.

The thing is that tax on such businesses are too low. Same as it is happening on other areas, the negative effects to society have zero counter measurements. AI will take all work and the government will crash because lack of money? Who cares? Private Firm buys all houses in a region and force the market into a false sense of scarcity to inflate prices? What could possibly go wrong? Other companies being bought in bulks by big players to hold IPs while dismissing all employees with false pretense that they are losing money? Nothing to see here..

The fact that the cost of using gray area to hide and move money to not pay taxes has a predictable and slow movement is the best for those players.

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

#188

Post by matheusmoreira »

mattkevan wrote: post #186
matheusmoreira wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made. Nothing wild about it. That's simply the reality of intellectual work. Only the first copy need ever be paid for. That is the true cost of creation. The cost of all subsequent copies is approximately $0 with 21st century computer technology. All intellectual work is information. All information is bits. All sequences of bits are numbers. All…

So if I wanted to write some notes or edit a photo you’re saying I should pay a team of developers to write custom code for me up front? Literally nothing works like that. There’s a huge difference between creative work and intellectual property, and a huge difference between the cost of creation and the cost of distribution.

The cost of distribution approaches zero. Once it's made, it's not actually scarce anymore. Intellectual property laws are all about creating artificial scarcity in order to increase distribution costs so as to compensate for the creation costs. Sooner or later, reality will reassert itself: people will pirate your product whether the laws allow it or not, simply because they can.

The ideal intellectual economy would be based on patronage where large amounts of people liberally support the creators they like. That way creators get compensated for the labour of creation, not the final result. Historical opposition to patronage involves fear of suppression by rich elites but now we have crowdfunding technology that enables sufficient decentralization, mitigating that risk.

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

#189

Post by baobun »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #138
charcircuit wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?)

On default modern Android I get the same: Only U+76F4 renders, not the other two.

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

#190

Post by _DeadFred_ »

fmajid wrote: post #172
eurekin wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back then (even in Reagan's 1980s) the Michael Douglas character types were despised by society. Now they are emulated and mainstreamed. We are set to have more private equity than McDonalds. American Capitalism is all about capital extraction now, not value creation.

https://www.thedailyupside.com/advisor/investing-strategies/...

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