Japanese Devs Face Font Licensing Dilemma as Annual Costs Increase From $380 To $20K (gamesindustry.biz) 94
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GamesIndustry.biz: Japanese game makers are struggling to locate affordable commercial fonts after one of the country's leading font licensing services raised the cost of its annual plan from around $380 to $20,500 (USD). As reported by Gamemakers and GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game license 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. UI/UX designer Yamanaka stressed that this would be particularly problematic for live service games; even if studios moved quickly and switched to fonts available through an alternate licensee, they will have to re-test, re-validate, and re-QA check content already live and in active use. The crisis could even eventually force some Japanese studios to rebrand entirely if their corporate identity is tied to a commercial font they can no longer afford to license.
The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters. UI/UX designer Yamanaka stressed that this would be particularly problematic for live service games; even if studios moved quickly and switched to fonts available through an alternate licensee, they will have to re-test, re-validate, and re-QA check content already live and in active use. The crisis could even eventually force some Japanese studios to rebrand entirely if their corporate identity is tied to a commercial font they can no longer afford to license.
Making a note... (Score:2)
Re: Making a note... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Making a note... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Making a note... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it reasonable for a (chain of-) provider(s) to suddenly increase licensing costs? Surely the work has been done already.
I'm not sure "we've suddenly become much greedier" or "we think you can be coerced into paying more now your business depends on our fixed-effort-ongoing-cost product" are customer problems.
The licensing cost used to attract a customer should get locked-in until something fundamental changes.
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Is it reasonable for a (chain of-) provider(s) to suddenly increase licensing costs? Surely the work has been done already.
To be clear it's not that they "increased" the cost, it's that they specifically eliminated a cheaper plan that the industry was relying on. Yes ultimately it's a distinction without a difference, but I really wonder why games specifically were getting a discount in the first place?
Re: Making a note... (Score:4, Insightful)
The effect is to hook them in when it's affordable then bait-and-switch FTW!
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Re: Making a note... (Score:1)
It's not worth licensing evil-business-plan because the licensing costs are guaranteed but it's entirely possible that courts may decide they've independently discovered their own, similar, form of evil-business-plan and so costs are not guaranteed :-)
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This would make sense if this were something new, but it's not. Bait and Switch are normally short lived scams. We're talking about dropping a plan that has existed for decades, which leads me to the question: why now?
This clearly wasn't a gameplan from the beginning and it would seem that the bigger problem is that there's *no* alternate plan. Rather it looks like the American Mothership is trying to milk some money out of its subsidiary.
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A UI might be badl
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Microsoft's popular Arial font was created to have the exact same dimensions and spacing as Helvetica. Font designs and things like spacing aren't protected by copyright law, only the actual code that defines the fonts, the font file, is.
The Microsoft version renders nicely on screen, and be substituted for Helvetica in print, and was much cheaper than licencing Helvetica itself. Apple did later licence Helvetica, but it looks crap on screen when rendered using their mediocre font rendering code.
Anyway, the
Re: Making a note... (Score:5, Informative)
your points about the need to retest are valid but ...
A UI might be badly broken if text flows off screen or becomes obscured by some other component.
... that's just an aficionado level layout problem, worth fixing anyway. wcsfo: write crap software, find out. a layout should never make strong assumptions about text content length or size. ofc there will be always limits, but if a simple font substitution causes an overflow the leeway is nonexistent or ridiculously low, or there is no layout system at all, and that's just a shitty ui. it's far easier to bump into those limits with e.g. localization or random dynamic content which is why taking this into account is not optional and there are well known tools and techniques, as well as mechanisms to prevent or mitigate overflow (and for automated testing, mind).
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Re: Making a note... (Score:3, Interesting)
Only 600 or so primatives make up the written languages derived from the Chinese "bone script", and only a few primatives make up 99% the characters. A rule based system could make quick work of rendering the five thousand or so logographics in common use from the primatives. We have the cpu cycles for it now.
Re: Making a note... (Score:1)
WTH is "primative", do you mean, primitive?
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it means samsung's phone spell correction wins over English, sperg-boy.
Linguists call them "radicals". bÃjiÃn is what the Chinese call them, and I can't wait to see what Slashdot's ancient code does with that when I hit "submit"
Re: Making a note... (Score:2)
That's not how autocorrect works, liar boy, but you do you.
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That's a general example based on vague memories though, I'm not sure if the character for house is a roof over a man, bu
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Sure, but the primitives are drawn with differences which are often subtle, but which make a huge change in legibility and aesthetics, when in combined kanji or hanzi. This is true in hand drawn or high resolution printed characters, but becomes a lot more important for fonts which are rendered with much lower resolution. For decoding, it's a cool shortcut, but for creating them the results will not be great.
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One can somewhat mitigate this with Japanese specifically, as it uses only ~2000 or so Kanji if I remember correctly; and by and large even those are composed of regular radicals; plus hirigana, katakana, and furigana.
Not to discount how challenging it would still be though - it still remains a large number of characters that need individual testing once all of those components have been put together.
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Japanese uses 2136 official characters, the JÅyÅ Kanji, yes. But they are not enough. There are also the JinmeiyÅ kanji, a few thousand names which have to be known to be able to read and write. Basic proficiency is often seen as the JÅyÅ Kanji plus around 1000 names. Expert proficiency is at over 3000 names, for some 6000 total characters.
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I think this is more of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Monotype is the parent and it seems they only license these fonts to websites or individual users per year. They have something about the amount of advertisements you can get off websites using their fonts?
What might of happened is the Japanize company Fontworks LETS sublicensed the fonts from Monotype with a custom license to sell them to game makers, and some reason the licensee expired or maybe it wasn't profitable. Just a
Re: Making a note... (Score:1)
Monotype is the largest OEM font licensor in the world. Nobody knows more about font licensing. There is nothing about game licensing on their web sites because they negotiate OEM licenses on a case by case basis.
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Because the owners just want to sell Monotype. The long term prospects of the company do not matter to them. They just want to make the current sales numbers look good to a prospective buyer. This is probably why nobody wants to buy Monotype.
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Just another reason to reign in private equity I guess. I don't know why we let that happen again, they're just the trusts we broke a hundred years ago.
Closed source software and assets are a bitch. (Score:4, Insightful)
Closed source software and assets are a bitch. If only someone had warned them.
Re:Closed source software and assets are a bitch. (Score:5, Informative)
There aren't many good open source fonts for Japanese. There weren't even that many good ones for Latin languages, until Google started releasing some under free licences.
By "good" I mean good coverage of all characters, proper keming, good hinting so that they render well and consistently on screen and in print, etc. It's a lot of work, and Japanese has a lot of characters.
Re:Closed source software and assets are a bitch. (Score:5, Funny)
I see what you did there.
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I think it's a complaint about how to spell "kerning", but I don't understand the funny moderation.
But kerning is not an issue for most of the Japanese characters. However if you want to get beyond kaisho, then the situation quickly becomes intractable. Gyosho is hard and I don't think I've ever seen a computer version--but sosho is much worse. The flowing script is often much too pretty to read. Even if you have the kaisho side-by-side it is often hard to find matching features.
Re:Closed source software and assets are a bitch. (Score:5, Informative)
On some fonts, r and n together are visually indistinguishable from the letter m, which is bad font design (and more specifically, bad kerning). It's one of those tiny details you have to keep in mind when designing a font, and not every font designer gets it right. Most people don't even mind that r-and-n and m are indistinguishable in some fonts and have gotten used to it, so the person I replied to typed "keming" (instead of kerning) to drive the point home (in a humorous manner) that not all fonts are well-designed, we've just gotten used to the fact that some fonts aren't that good.
Other small details in font design include making sure that capital i is different from lowercase l, and if your font implements the Greek alphabet, making sure the greek letter pi is visually consistent with the rest of the Greek alphabet (pi is also a symbol in math, and as a result in some fonts it is inconsistent with the rest of the Greek alphabet, Comic Sans MS is guilty of this where the pi letter is smaller than the other Greek letters, not that you should use that font anyway).
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Thanks for clarifying. Reminds me of some books I've read about fonts... Sounds like you don't need the citations.
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Good 1!
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Microsoft actually released a set of "Core Fonts for the Web" back in 1996, which while proprietary was available for free distribution with certain caveats.
Linux systems all had a way to get them - they often consist of a script to download the original font packages and then extracted them for use on Linux desktops. This greatly improved the typography so it was popular on Linux systems to i
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What about SIL? They released a few fonts for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic under the SIL Open Font License before Google Fonts existed - and, in fact, Google uses their licence for some fonts.
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It's a lot of work, and Japanese has a lot of characters.
That they probably use a small subset of, And can have a bot scan their game's text assets for all characters presented in a certain font
and build a font with only the ones used in their existing program.
nice! (Score:1)
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That's insightful, what open source alternatives do you propose? There's hundreds for our alphabet, but there's fuck-all out there for Japanese / Chinese, many thanks to literally thousands of glyphs existing in the language.
Here's one character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] just one of the several thousands which has more strokes than the entire Latin alphabet, Greek alphabet, including both lower case and upper case combined.
There's multiple orders of magnitude more complexity here with multiple order
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That's insightful, what open source alternatives do you propose? There's hundreds for our alphabet, but there's fuck-all out there for Japanese / Chinese, many thanks to literally thousands of glyphs existing in the language.
Sounds like the sort of thing the governments of Japan / China ought to tackle. Do it once on the public dime, then freely license it (or open source it), and you've eliminated one cost for entire industries. It becomes a public good, like GNSS.
Will it work everywhere a font is needed? No, but neither does it need to be.
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It doesn't solve a fundamental issue of style though. Is the government going to do this job 10 times? 20 times? A font exists and can be used, the question is do you want every product to look the same?
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It doesn't solve a fundamental issue of style though. Is the government going to do this job 10 times? 20 times? A font exists and can be used, the question is do you want every product to look the same?
Allow me to reiterate how I ended my comment: "Will it work everywhere a font is needed? No, but neither does it need to be."
The government does not need to solve this problem for everyone, everywhere. The government can provide a "good enough" solution for lots of things. Nor does everyone need to use it, even if it is readily available and free to use. Outfits that want a particular style can develop their own or cough up for someone else's. And even if some things start to look the same - so what?
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Less than 50 of those provide comprehensive character sets. And a quick flick through them shows a complete lack of creativity between them.
Re:English (Score:4, Insightful)
English /is/ the language of business and commercial culture, although Chinese will probably overtake in a few decades.
But this is about fonts in end-user product, and if you think that Japanese companies should makd Japanese games for Japanese people in English language, you have a tough sell ahead of you...
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To make his suggestion at *least* vaguely closer to reasonable, even if not there, could just say text will be in the phonetic scripts. So maybe not Kanji, but sure, Hiragana and Katakana.
If it is true that no one will reasonably provide fonts for cheap to cover the thousands of Kanji, you could still be in native language with a manageable scope by sticking to the phonetic scripts.
Switching to kana is homophonic (Score:3)
you could still [write Japanese] in native language with a manageable scope by sticking to the phonetic scripts.
Exclusive use of kana (Japanese phonetic characters) was common in games for MSX, Famicom, and other 8-bit platforms. The one problem with that is the sheer number of homophones in both Chinese and Japanese, words spoken the same and written differently. Kana normally don't even distinguish which syllable a word is accented on, which would be like writing Chinese without its tones. Yet somehow Korean avoided this and switched from Chinese characters (Hanja) to a suitable phonetic alphabet (Hangul).
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"Chinese will probably overtake in a few decades"
i doubt this, mostly because one is more difficult to use/universally then the other.
Re: English (Score:2)
Then* ...
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Japanese, on the other hand, is an atonal synthetic language, which makes it much easier for the rest of the world to understand. It also sounds nice, while Mandarin sounds frikking disgus
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I guess we first have to pick Cantonese or Mandarin first, but whatever.
I have to wonder then, what language do the tone deaf Chinese speak? There's bound to be about 70M of them.
Me personally, I cannot stand Italian, which is probably the top contender for the most beautiful language.
But my point is. The particular Lingua Franca of the times is based on what the most important country is, be it globally or locally. English being it was based first on the global span of the British Empire, and then of the U
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Anyhow, you left out how "Lingua Franca" literally means "(the) French language", as they were the dominant force for a time. It remained the language for diplomacy well into the era of British dominance.
Note that most of the world uses the L
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I said Lingua Franca specifically to draw attention to the fact that no language stays in the position forever. Times change, and languages come and go. Latin came, and went, French came, and went, and English came, and will go, too. Many more languages have had their time in the spotlight, too.
As to the analytic/synthetic, English itself is mostly analytic by now; there's some more European languages that are fully analytic, and some that are somewhat analytic.
But more importantly, no characteristics of a
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if everyone would agree to use English, this problem goes away.
I suppose it's doable, if you have enough non-commercial fonts available for every conceivable use. But it would be cultural annihilation on a scale never before seen. What if all of humanity only ate chicken eggs from now on (you can survive on them so why not), or if we got rid of all music except 'Yesterday' by The Beatles.
Is that a world you would want to live in?
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Not trolling at all, but fairly typical of unilingual english speakers.
Multiculturalism is as important as biodiversity, and for the same reasons.
Every one that is not part of the dominant cultural landscape understands this, because they've had to fight to protect their language/culture all their life. Those who are born in the dominant culture don't. And I can't blame them for not understanding, but I can blame them for not wanting to understand.
Unilingual speakers all seem to think that languages are jus
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Op here. I know several languages.
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Lingui
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Instead of saying they should use English instead (personally, I love the sound of Japanese), I'd try to discourage the ongoing use of Kanji. Hiragana (a bit like English cursive) and Katakana (bit like English block letters, always used for loanwords) are syllabaries with 4
Let AI do it! (Score:3, Funny)
Just vibe-code the font! What could possibly go wrong?
Seriously though, this sounds like it's time for the industry to cooperate on creating some open-sourced default fonts and technology to make it easier to edit (and share) new fonts.
Re:Let AI do it! (Score:4, Informative)
Google already has: https://fonts.google.com/ [google.com]
Not all made by Google, but all open source.
If you filter by language you can see that some languages are not very well covered.
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the funny thing, I could see AI being a game changer for Manga. A lot of Manga is simple brute force work adding shading and the like that could be better done in software. Though I don't think you need AI for that, good software could do it.
But a lot of it's still done the old fashioned way, which is a shame because several of my favorite man
Two problems (Score:2, Troll)
It seems like there are two unrelated problems here. First, TFA implies that this is affecting existing games. That is truly a licensing issue, and I suppose a Japanese legal expert would need to chime in: Can a font developer change the licensing conditions for an existing product? It seems to me that this should not be possible.
The second issue is really more of a non-issue. If a studio cannot find an "affordable commercial font", then they should just use a free font. Designers obsess way too much over
vmware has an few lawsuits over stuff like that (Score:2)
vmware has an few lawsuits over stuff like that
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OEM licenses for fonts are not always perpetual. These Japanese companies probably had licenses that expired and got screwed when they had to renew. This kind of licensing is often beneficial for the licensee because they can buy a less expensive license then replace dated fonts in their products with new ones every few years.
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A license to use a font in a published product, at a minimum, should not ever expire for that product. Fonts do not receive the type of maintenance to justify recurring fees.
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If the licence was for a specific period of time (say, 2 years) with no term that the renewal has to be at the same price (or not be more than such and such higher than the original price) the font owner doesn't have to offer the same terms for a renewal. They don't care you have integrated their font in a "live service" game that you keep making available from your website or Play Store/App Store account. As long as you keep maki
say no to arabic numerals (Score:1)
https://youtube.com/shorts/TnO... [youtube.com]
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As someone who doesn't speak the language, I really don't understand the problem. What's the problem with using a "common font"? Practically everything I write is done using Arial because I like it. Can I read the others just fine? Yes, and after about 1 or 2 sentences I stop noticing the different font (unless it is horribly different like some of the gothic fonts). Perhaps it is a cultural thing where the font is supposed to be art, but to me a font is a way to communicate words and a "common font" makes
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This is PE assholes fucking stuff up again. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not typical of the font industry. Most type designers are solo practitioners or small studios that license their work directly and treat customers well. The asshole in question here, Monotype, is owned by a private equity firm that overpaid for it, then bought some small font companies, and is now trying to sell the combined company for a markup of billions of dollars. But Monotype's revenues were hit hard by Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts, so they are trying to make up for it by dramatically increasing licensing fees. The higher prices have turned off customers which is hurting sales. They also tried and failed at AI. And their distribution agreement with type designers got nasty so they have lost some popular typefaces that used to be sold on MyFonts. Now Monotype is floundering and has been laying people off. Nobody wants to buy the company and it is now probably worth less than the owners paid for it. What Monotype is doing to these Japanese developers is going to bite them in the ass; AI for rapidly developing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts is right around the corner and in a few years Monotype will end up in a price war with smaller rivals, which they will not win.
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Are there really no PD Asian fonts? (Score:2)
I would have thought by now, after 40 years of computerization, that there would be some robust Asian language fonts available in the public domain or perhaps licensed through government agencies to promote their use.
All the way back in the 1980s, I was involved in a Japanese/Chinese/English photo-typesetter project using what I believe were freely available font sets.
Seems like the Japanese game companies should switch to Google or MS fonts. $20K/year in Japan is someone's salary.
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There are some PD or freeware Asian fonts, more for Chinese than for Japanese, but not many of them are great or useful for every purpose. Free design fonts are rare, but that's also the case for Latin-based languages too. A good design font is usually going to cost money. If you're making a company logo that's a different set of requirements than publishing a newsletter or magazine, versus a website, versus an app or game.
Famously there is Japan's IPA (Information-technology Promotion Agency) Font series.
Clear Monopolistic Behavior (Score:2)
those japanese... (Score:1)
they never heard of open source fonts ?
It's a lot harder to make 3000 glyphs (Score:2)
Among widely available fonts under OFL, GNU GPL for Fonts, or other free licenses, not many of them cover the 2,100-odd Jouyou (regularly used) kanji and 1,000 name kanji that BadDreamer mentioned [slashdot.org]. It's a lot easier to make a font that covers 100-200 characters from two alphabets, such as Chilanka that covers the Latin and Malayalam scripts in a distinctive and dyslexia-friendly handwritten style, than one that covers 3,000 different kanji made of 600 radicals (as iggymanz mentioned [slashdot.org]) with manually-tuned sli
Simple answer (Score:2)
$20,500 (USD) (Score:2)
How many hours of an Asian font designer'(s) time can you buy for $20k? It'd be funny, if it turns out that firing the font company pays off in less than a year.
Historically, that writing system made sense (Score:2)
But in modern times it has stopped doing that. Now it is a hard-to-learn, hard-to-use historical artefact. Either move to something that makes sense today or stop complaining. You are doing it to yourselves.
TBH (Score:2)
The entire concept of licensing a font to begin with is archaic and stupid. I would pay a one time fee to use a font, but not any kind of recurring fee.
Sounds like BS (Score:2)