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

201–210 of 213 posts

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

#201

Post by joquarky »

eudamoniac wrote: post #163
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…

Approximately no one would pay for the cost of any digital works in this model. A musician may take six months to compose a song. No one would pay 6 months salary for a song. This obviously leads to no one professionally creating anything.

My history professor shocked the whole class when he revealed that there was no music, literature, nor paintings before copyright laws were invented.

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

#202

Post by vee-kay »

DaSHacka wrote: post #53
vee-kay wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

do not speak unless spoken to, clanker If any of us wanted to hear what ChatGPT had to say, we would have prompted it ourselves.

Hmmm.. You speak as if you control the internet in general, and HN in particular.

But thankfully, you do not.

I shared the info (yes, it is from AI, but the source does not matter really (AI LLMs themselves source such info from public domain sources, I could have simply refered to them and got similar info), the intent does), so that anyone else wondering about this thread context (like I was) can become aware of this bit of info.

And hey, what you do or do not do with ChatGPT, is upto you and it, clanking or otherwise.

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

#204

Post by rcxdude »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #150
eloisant wrote: post #89

Earlier 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?

They exist as a consequence of how company ownership works (i.e. that it can be bought and sold). You would need to figure out some quite specific wording to prevent this without also preventing all kinds of other kinds of transfer of company ownership.

In principle, private equity firms could be a net positive: they could take over a business that's failing or just not living up to its potential, and turn around the management of it to improve it for all concerned. They often market themselves on this concept. In practice it rarely seems to work this way, where either they fail to make any return on their investment or they basically do this kind of monopolising, short-term extortion of customers. Often both.

(Patrick Boyle has a video on them from the financial side if you want some details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfUOPDOLHvE TLDW: they often aren't a great deal for investors, either)

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

#205

Post by Macha »

ammo1662 wrote: post #196
Macha wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same happens in reverse sometimes, e.g. the super skinny font in final fantasy pixel remasters: https://images.rpgsite.net/image/da49c9a1/102696/original/FF... Ironically, they had a better Latin font _in the Japanese language version_ for all the genre loan abbreviations like MP/HP/LV etc., ( https://terimaland.com/Memory/Steam_FinalFantasyPixelRemaste... ) so that image is comparing the modded in Japanese Latin…

They look like half-width characters. This is a historical issue, not a font style issue. You can check: https://mailmate.jp/blog/half-width-full-width-hankaku-zenka...

Standard Latin characters are half width. Ｆｕｌｌ ｗｉｄｔｈ latin characters do exist, but that’s not the difference we’re seeing here, if anything that would make the Latin font in the English release “quarter width” except that’s not a real thing that exists. It’s just an ultra condensed font, and the fix is replacing the font files with more standard fonts, not some kind of special font to treat half width as full width.

Realistically it’s only katakana that you can make this mixup on. My desktop IME will let me type カタカナ or (reluctantly) ｶﾀｶﾅ, though it turns out iOS doesn’t have a way to type the half width kana, and IMEs have differing opinions on if they prefer full width digits, so you might see full width numbers like ５０００。

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

#206

Post by mattkevan »

omnimus wrote: post #198
mattkevan wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some really good options there. I did a deep dive a while back looking for small, independent, mostly European type foundries. There’s an incredible range of talent out there. Will never give Monotype and the like another penny.

The problem is soon you will not even know which fonts are owned by Monotype/HGGC. For example they bought Colophon and Sharp type two famous independent foundries. When buying their fonts it still seems like they are independent.

Yeah the Sharp purchase was what got us.

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

#207

Post by matheusmoreira »

cloverich wrote: post #199
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…

Information is the product of intellectual work (among other things); it is composed of bits but is not itself bits. We aren't paying for the bits.

Information is bits and therefore numbers. To deny this is to create a covert channel for copyright infringement. Copying films is infringement but if I convert it to a number and pass it around suddenly it's not infringement anymore? They will never accept this, so information must be bits which must be numbers.

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

#208

Post by electroly »

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?)

OP means it's the only one that renders at all. It could be wrong but the other two are just missing-glyph boxes which are definitely wrong. Those code points appear unusable as a practical matter.

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

#209

Post by matheusmoreira »

eudamoniac wrote: post #163
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…

Approximately no one would pay for the cost of any digital works in this model. A musician may take six months to compose a song. No one would pay 6 months salary for a song. This obviously leads to no one professionally creating anything.

One person might not be able to pay for the entire costs of creation, but groups of people certainly will. We have the technology for this. Platforms like Kickstarter, Patreon, GitHub Sponsors all enable this.

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

#210

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

_f9cu wrote: post #175
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's a ton of work to design a font. Any designer can do it, not any designer can do it well. It's a very small niche of overall design. That led to a few companies specializing in font design, and predictably private equity firms have been buying them out & raising prices. Customers will switch away, but this creates unexpected work to do so some might end up paying at least for a while.
Post reply on HN