Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. However Monotype’s business practices are such that I won’t approve anything but open source fonts for new projects.
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 would already be bought. (from comment above “Mostly swiss/european companies likes of Grilli type, Lineto, Dinamo, Klim type, Florian Karsten, Swiss typefaces… companies with often just few employees.”)
I saw multiple font discussions today. These are just variations on letters, there was some interesting stuff in the past but it’s over now. There should be no ip left, just remove all protections. The world won’t be worse off.
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.
Now the choice is realistically between Monotype (doesn't really understand the Japanese market) and DynaComware (Taiwan-based, but has previously interacted with Japanese companies). I wonder where their customers will go on short notice? As is mentioned, at least one company switched to DynaComware. SEGA's rhythm games contain both DynaFont (DynaComware) and Fontworks fonts, for example.
Basically, if you're going to raise prices, at least do something about the fact that your core market is heavily relationship dependent and won't take kindly to a sudden rug pull.
In general I don't think it's just that. Pretty much all font foundries have... insufferable business models.
I once emailed one Japanese foundry asking to license one of their font to use on my website. I wanted a perpetual, one-time license to use on a single website, and I wanted to store and serve their font from my server. I was even prepared to pay low four figures for it.
Nope. I was told I need to pay a subscription fee, and I need to use their crappy Javascript to serve it. Okay, if you don't want my money then I'm not going to insist.
And if not, then AI is overhyped and plugging it is even less justifiable.
Either way, just stop.
Admittedly Pre-AI, someone might have spammed their font business and received a similar frustrated response.
Maybe it's more about the shilling?
The few companies that actually did well in Japan did so specifically because they spent at least five minutes to understand the local context and adapt their business to actually make sense there. Any western companies that actually do this get embraced like nothing else by the Japanese audience. I'm reminded of Apple deliberately pushing for emoji in Unicode just so they could sell iPhones that weren't beholden to the horrible mess that was Japanese telecom emoji standards...
Maybe it's because it's a dumb question but the article doesn't really set the stage for me why it's an issue that 1 font licensing company raised its prices. I guess they must have a monopoly or else this change isn't commercially viable (the article just says "one of the country's leading font licensing services"), but even then, there ought to be open options
If you've picked a typeface, and designed other UI elements that look good in conjunction with it, but suddenly that typeface becomes unaffordable, then you have to do some work to find an alternative that's still acceptable.
In particular, game UI tends to be designed around the particular dimensions (metrics) of a font's characters. So a string of text whose size is "just right" in one font might look too big or too small in another, even at the same nominal font size. And this can affect many different pieces of text throughout a game.
Arial is popular because people see it and say "good enough!".
Not true at all. For instance, Arial was/is typically used as the fallback font for Windows users visiting a website that relied on system sans-serif fonts, while Helvetica shipped with OSX and would be prioritized for those lucky users.
Arial would be chosen by Windows users as good enough because they were already locked in a prison of bad design and terrible typeface rendering anyway, and didn't have other sensible options installed by default.
Serif fonts were used in print media for ages but when computers came around sans serif became significantly more popular as no longer was there the legibility concern with dodgy pigment applicators etc.
People started to switch to sans serif fonts more and more and would seek out an alternative to the widely defaulted Times New Roman in early days. They'd open the alphebetically sorted fonts list and what did they see at the top?
Arial.
Keep in mind, when personal computing started out, we didn't have a ton of fonts packaged with the system to start with. Just a handful. Arial has pretty much always been there.
But, as everyone else has mentioned, font usage in games (and most creative visual works) is more particular than just the bare minimum of "does it actually render the glyphs". Imagine if all text in your favourite game was all Times New Roman, it would make the game worse.
Now it's been years since I played a game in russian (almost a decade at this point I think) and I am so glad I don't have to put up with that anymore. Once in a while I see a screenshot from a cyrillic-using language translated game and probably half of the time the fonts are still bad.
Perhaps it is time for more people to invest in royalty free IP? We are seeing a bit of a tragedy of the commons type of situation going down, right now.
I guess the trouble is that game companies can't really band together and pool money to make a good font since the point is to look unique, so this only works for the largest studios. Otoh, at least for now, the smaller ones might stay below the 25k user limit
It is that existing annually paid licences are converted. The extra work for existing titles is the problem. And:
> 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.
Fontworks’ team, type inventory, IP, technology, and services will join global type specialist Monotype–Monotype’s first acquisition in Japan.
https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1jqqlm6/mon...
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Reddit is weird these days. I'm not even sure how this is related to fonts.
I would gladly go back to the older 14+14 system, even though I have nontrivial income from royalties. In my opinion, copyright should motivate people to create new things, not one cash cow that they then will milk for eternity.
How do the big Unicode OSS fonts like Noto, Deja Vu deal with this?
It sure has its style and I stand by what I've always maintained about gameplay being infinitely more important than polished graphics, but that does sound ironic to my ears!
Type layout in Japanese in particular has a system of layered, complex rules that include rules that define how to combine Western glyphs with Japanese glyphs and produce visually harmonic work. Swapping a font out due to a cost issue is not workable.
Also, not all pan-asian fonts contain all the glyphs you need to render all the characters you want. A CJK font has tens of thousands of characters, and it wouldn't surprise me if some of these video games will use fonts with particular glyphs that are not always included in other fonts.
Monotype is giving these customers the finger while also ramming a bulldozer in their asses with this change. It's completely unacceptable, painfully rude, and ridiculously tone deaf. In fairness, this is totally on brand for Monotype.
I am not sure if it's possible to parameterize it to have the look that game developers wanted.
Sounds like a typical private equity endeavor with short term thinking.
-- edit --
I'd add that companies always strive for more income. This is dead end. You cannot earn more without creating more. "Just add ai and convert to subscription" - this is current model. But, as Chris Rea sung, this ain't no technological breakdown, oh no, this is the road to hell
Many symbols are collections of other symbols raised and placed more or less on a grid. You could cover quite a lot with not that many created glyphs. Now, actually making it good quality and properly adjusted... that could take years...
Edit: This paragraph was incorrect:
The fonts affected apparently include ones like the main Japanese language
font used by the game Genshin Impact, which has 2.8 million daily users
worldwide (no idea of the Japanese user count specifically, but I'm sure
it's over 25,000).
https://www.hanyi.com.cn/adminlte/ueditor/image/20230906/169...
Monotype has a Chinese subsidiary [0] which has worked with Chinese champions like Tencent [1] and Alibaba [2].
As long as a foreign vs Chinese business dispute doesn't involve a national champion or a very politically connected Chinese firm (or the foreign company made a partnership with a politically connected partner) the dispute is somewhat fair.
While China's leadership is trying to build self-sufficiency, it is also still trying to attract foreign companies to China and prevent an FDI outflow [3], and that requires some level of impartiality in contract disputes. China is not as economically isolated as Russia is today - though even Russian authorities tend to only use the heavy hammer against American and European companies as can be seen with the continued operation of Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and Indian firms in Russia despite the risk of sanctions.
[0] - https://cn.monotype-asia.com/contact-us
[1] - https://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/tencent-expa...
[2] - https://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/alibaba-grou...
[3] - https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/zhengceku/202507/content_7032625....
It’s wonderful to see capitalism work so well. First you sell cheap to create vendor lock-in and undercut your competition.
Then once you have a monopoly, you hike up the price. Until a government authority comes along and introduces state sponsored competition or declares you “too big to fail”.
Rinse and repeat.
EDIT:
Being downvoted for stating the obvious is fairly typical for HN.
Too many folks here have a mental disconnect between their earnings (stocks in large for-profit tech companies) and complaining when their favourite game maker has to fork out more money to supply the profit for said large tech company.
You can't have it both ways. You can't pretend it's unfair when smaller, non-greedy companies get squeezed out by behemoth companies that are forced to increase their earnings, else their stock owners will complain and the share value will drop.
If you're going to downvote my comment, then please also point out where my thinking is off. All I did was describe how capitalism works and the consequences thereof.
Probably because you're wrong. Anybody can make a font, making a good font is a highly under appreciated art form.
Maybe the next major update will be able to do it.
It wasn't long ago that we thought creativity and programming were safe from AI. Fonts are entirely within the realm of possibilities within 12 months.
The price rising and licensing issue will only do one thing: pushing people to AI. Perhaps they see it as inevitable so they're trying to milk the last batch of customers though.
Even then, I wouldn't want it making a kanji font. Consider 感 and 惑, both of which would be taught before high school.
Also, generating images and programs are basically orthogonal. AI could generate impeccable photorealistic images of clocks years ago, and they're much more complex than font glyphs (specifically talking about transferring a style to other glyphs; you still need to do the initial design to get something appealing, obviously*).
*Edit: Maybe AI can even handle the initial design now, not sure. What I’m saying is AI-assisted style transfer in CJK fonts is definitely old news and commercially available.
Haiku 3.5 had a one right too. But k2 apparently is very good at html and css.
It would be pretty easy to make a font generator using LLMs and visual models.
Also how would you enforce the 25,000 user limit or is this just from a contractual perspective.
