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

Ah Monotype. Knew before reading the article it would be them. Their whole MO is buying up smaller type foundries, massively increasing the licensing fees and shaking down the previous customers. They send in auditors, demand to see traffic data and threaten fines. Happened to me twice now.

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.

The lack of competence from companies that acquire Japanese companies, and then fail to even price things in yen or offer support packages that cater to Japanese customers is really something. It's one thing to raise the price on a license, but it's another thing to not even support local pricing (you can even do this dynamically) or try to meet users halfway. The thing that companies like this do not understand is that simply changing the price structure on Japanese customers overnight with no acknowledgement of this comes off as entirely the wrong way. It ruins business relationships. Sure, Fontworks might have had a compelling product, but part of the product was their domestic presence.

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.

Are there no fonts that are open for anyone to use, like what does a Linux distribution ship? Surely those can render Japanese characters?

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

So Monotype is going to make some more money in the short term, then when customers eventually find replacements they lose the revenue.

Sounds like a typical private equity endeavor with short term thinking.

Why did they rent the fonts instead of buying in the first place?

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone coming up together, creating better fonts for free, and wiping out any of those profits. Is Monotype trying to destroy their own industry, or do they really think this will work?

> The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji [...]

Minor nitpick: most font companies target the first two levels of JIS X 0208 character set.

For example, 鶯谷 includes a letter neither in the 常用漢字表 nor 人名用漢字. However, 鶯 is in JIS X 0208 Level 2, so practically all Japanese fonts will be able to represent this name. The difficulties begin when dealing with text containing characters placed in lower levels (i.e. Level 3 and Level 4. Or worse, strictly outside of JIS X 0208).

I never thought about this but JP fonts probably need thousands of glyphs? Creating new fonts must be brutal.

Fonts are an absolute joke. Foundries must be run by the mafia at this point.

I guess making a kanji font of your own is a big investment - thousands of symbols. With a western font you could wrap something up in a couple days if needed.

This is something that happens currently all over the world. Yet another company thinks they can get away with steep price increase at the end of the year. People must understand that economy must be ecological. If you behave like a cancer and kill your host, you won't live forever

-- 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

Why would a company pay for fonts?

The bigger issue here isn't the pricing, it's the 25,000 max users added to the licenses, which means that anyone who can genuinely afford these fonts isn't actually allowed to use them.

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).

Am I the only one who was introduced to the concept of font licensing after reading this?

Also how would you enforce the 25,000 user limit or is this just from a contractual perspective.

What do I feel like custom font generation is one thing AI could be really good at but so far I haven’t seen anything of that sort? Seems like you could easily prompt whatever vibe you’re looking for in a font, why even bother buying commercial fonts at that point. Am I just not looking in the right places?

that fucking robbery

That's a bit of a jump isn't it?