Nowadays, creating fonts is easier than ever, with widely available tools. Creating good fonts that don’t look like hot garbage and don’t make your eyes hurt after reading a paragraph is somewhat harder, though type designers graduate from courses every year. There are lots of small independent foundries selling fonts around the world, and consultancies that will design fonts on commission for brands. If Monotype are going to play the private-equity extortion game, they’ll soon find game companies commissioning fonts they then own outright from designers, or even hiring a few type designers with the usual intake of 3D graphics/texture/animation artists.
Japanese devs face font licensing dilemma as leading provider increases annual plan price from $380 to $20,000+
Submitted 1 day ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to gaming@beehaw.org
Comments
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 16 hours ago
alyaza@beehaw.org 1 day ago
As reported by Gamemakers and GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game licence plan at the end of November.
The expensive replacement plan – offered through Fontwork’s parent company, Monotype – doesn’t even provide local pricing for Japanese developers, and comes with a 25,000 user-cap, which is likely not workable for Japan’s bigger studios.
The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 1 day ago
What is this even licensing? You can’t copyright a typeface in Japan or the US: en.wikipedia.org/…/Intellectual_property_protecti…
Technically the .ttf file could be copyright as a specific means to reproduce the typeface, but someone could just run it through something to copy the shapes and then there’s nothing to be licensed.
inconel@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Japanese law doesn’t consider font itself or the style to be copyrighted, but font files are considered “program” (it is very broad in jurisdictional sense, roughly means digital data that produce products through computational process, which displaying letters on moniter is applicable) and thus fall under under copyright protection.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 10 hours ago
That’s what I was saying with the .ttf file being copyright. It’s entirely possible to generate a new “program” that produces the same shapes while being a brand new uncopyrighted program. There’s an infinite number of ways to describe how to draw a shape, only one of them is copyright.
scratchee@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Notosans all the things everywhere? It’s a shame, but font users have an ethical duty to not pay these scumbags anything
nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip 15 hours ago
Noto Sans definitely not choice for most of games.
Imagine having Elden Ring or Persona being served as Noto Sans. Even text heavy games, especially visual novel, use unique suitable font on main menu.
spaciouscoder78@lemmy.ml 21 hours ago
There are a lot of free fonts (open source in your language) out there that cost nothing to use.
Burnoutdv@feddit.org 11 hours ago
Unfortunately there is a high level of complexity in some asian text, Chinese and Japanese kanji that are very similar have thousands of characters that are built in parts as far as i understood the technical site but are still annoyingly diverse, so you need a lot more than just lower, upper case, numbers and special characters
Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
Are you sure about this being true in Japanese? Open source culture over there might be different, and I don’t think many Western fonts include Japanese glyphs.
ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
I’d bet it’s easier (and probably exists) with Katagana and Hiragana, Kanji OTOH, maybe not.
Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org 1 day ago
So then it sounds like somebody just needs to provide a font for applications that is a low priced one time payment and they would do pretty well. I wonder how difficult it is
AntiBullyRanger@ani.social 1 day ago
Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
Yes, I too love allowing large corporations to steal from independent artists and use their larger resources to take market share and all of the profit
AntiBullyRanger@ani.social 1 day ago
Have the penalties for what you ratified for. 🎻
nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip 15 hours ago
Yeah, Japanese copyright law for software seriously needs to be overhaul.
AntiBullyRanger@ani.social 12 hours ago
nah, the whole thing. authoritarianism needs to die.
WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
People complain about the evil of landlords, but it’s nothing compared to companies like this.
Landlords at least nominally provide some sort of ongoing services. There are no necessary services a font company could possibly provide - there’s no maintenance, no upkeep, no ongoing costs at all. This is just pure, and purely evil, rent-seeking.
TehPers@beehaw.org 1 day ago
To be clear, there are some awful landlords out there. I agree with your point, but I don’t want to diminish the dislike of many landlords.
SARGE@startrek.website 1 day ago
Landlords province nothing to society, they are leeches who profit off others hard work simply because they “own the property” the worker lives on and takes care of.
Save a tree, axe a landlord.