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.
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