versefediJapanese devs face font licensing dilemma as leading provider increases annual plan price from $380 to $20,000+
Yet another reason to use and support open fonts.
Idk how many fonts are typically in a game but at $20k a pop, I suspect you could hire your own designer or collaborate with a few other small studios to design a few open game fonts.
I think the collab would be more likely.
Ideally the government would create public domain fonts for their official languages.
If they publish in that language then they should support the font for that language.
Funding such an endeavour as a single studio/designer would require making over 6000 characters for the font ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208 ).
I’m sure modern unicode could do wonders to reduce that number (kanji has ~2,000).
what about just using noto
ryannathans20k per year
The problem is Japanese has so many characters - typically a font would need 5-6000 glyphs to be usably complete - that it isn’t easy to create new fonts.
English ASCII is 96 characters, for reference. A designer can crank out a new thematically-appropriate font in a week.
They might even need 6-7 thousand glyphs
Eager EagleI really don’t get this strategy, it sounds like “we’d rather make $0 than $380” to me, unless they’re really the only font out there and paying a designer for 6 months still can’t get the job done.
If even one company opts to keep paying the license, that makes up for over 50 cancellations. They need less than 1/50 of their current licensees to continue paying to break even.
It’s shitty, but it’s basically a company taking themselves out of an entry-level market to extract more money from the types of clients where $20,500 is a rounding error.
bizarrolandAlso, there’s probably a lot of money to be made in being a font hunter for these companies. You find a company that has infringed on the font holder’s rights. You bring that information to them. You get permission to sue on their behalf and then reap the rewards. And most companies will fork out the $20,000 rather than spend $50 or $100,000 on Litigation, and the font rights holder will catch the $20,000 on the year after for free
I’d argue that the ratio needs to be much higher than 1/50 to compensate for the increase in risk. It’s a lot easier to lose a handful of customers than hundreds. And this increase doesn’t look good at all for the customers that stay.
Fonts cannot be easily removed or replaced. So you pay their extortion or they sue you and get it anyway. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They are the comic villain kind of evil.
to be fair, anyone using a font for branding that requires an annual subscription, put themselves in that spot. I think the reasons would be technical in this case. But they’re basically betting that $20k/y in a couple years couldn’t pay for the efforts to replace it, and I think that’s really risky.
Monotype is functionally an international monopoly. More than Luxottica, but for many of the same reasons. If the small selection of open source fonts don’t do what a company needs, then their only option other than Monotype is to have a font created. Monotype owns almost everything font related. Companies, fonts, everything.
magnetosphereThe 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.
Regarding this particular problem, I’m on the side of the gaming industry on every issue except this one. It’s sheer insanity not to own everything involved with your company’s identity, ffs. That’s just a monumentally bad decision with obvious, foreseeable risks. I will shed no tears if a big studio has to go through an expensive rebrand because of their own incompetent decision making.
That being said, I don’t know anything about Japanese font licensing besides what’s presented in this article. If anyone has important nuance to add, please do!
Apparently unlike Latin alphabet fonts Japanese fonts are very hard to make due to the sheer number of characters, so there's fewer of them.
Is it Monotype?
Yes, it’s Monotype. For those who don’t know, they are an illegal international monopoly that aggressively buys up all competitors for the purpose of extorting users like this. It is their entire business model and they have been allowed to get away with it for over a decade because of how well they’ve hidden themselves.
they took their name seriously
“There can only be one type”
Use an open font. Problem solved. Can I please have the 380 bucks annually now?
Build an open source & paid cloud hosted service that can sync OFL licensed fonts through an API, GUI, GIT and you’ll be swimming in cash. Just make sure it’s easy for casuals & devs and works for both individuals and teams.
There are projects similar to this, but nothing nearly this level of usable by everyone.
Why the hell would anyone need to host free fonts? A proper OS has them in the repos.
Oh right - there’s still people who believe the diarrhea coming from MicroLimp is a “proper OS” :/ especially corporate IT departments :(
Your post reads a bit aggresive towards a use case completely fabricated within your imagination. However, it’s quite different in reality.
I do graphic design and need a FOSS alternative to Fontbase, but also able to comply with technical requirements for dev teams.
Something like what I’ve described in my OP would be great for both dev and designer teams alike.
Also, if you try to be nicer to people, you’ll help make the Fediverse a nicer place.
I was being aggressive, but not towards another poster, but the corporate bullshit culture that requires such a thing as an online repository for free fonts.
If you are collaborating with a team, you need to keep your work in sync.
What does this have to do with corporativism?
If designing fonts is part of the work, all you need is a versioning repository like a forgejo or gitlab instance.
pewgar_seemsimandroidpirates Helvetica cutely