Japanese devs face font licensing dilemma as leading provider increases annual plan price from $380 to $20,000+
Japanese devs face font licensing dilemma as leading provider increases annual plan price from $380 to $20,000+
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.
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.
Notosans all the things everywhere? It’s a shame, but font users have an ethical duty to not pay these scumbags anything
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.
What is this even licensing? You can't copyright a typeface in Japan or the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces#Japan
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.
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 translates to "digital data that produce products through computational process", and displaying letters on monitor is applicable) and thus fall under under copyright protection.
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 the one in the original file is copyright.
There are a lot of free fonts (open source in your language) out there that cost nothing to use.
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
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.
It's likely, but I wouldn't extrapolate from my Western experiences in this case.
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
Or kill copyright. Japan is nothing without that fascist slave collarMET.
Have the penalties for what you ratified for. 🎻
Yeah, Japanese copyright law for software seriously needs to be overhaul.
nah, the whole thing. authoritarianism needs to die.
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.
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.
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.