Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.
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Monotype may as well be the mafia. My wife's work had to deal with those assholes, too, after they bought the rights to some font. They're just shaking companies down for cash.
after they bought the rights to some font.
Now That's What I Call Capitalism
I would be burning fucking buildings down. I'd be at the top of the FBI's most wanted list.
This would be an interesting comic strip. A company that has purchased all the fonts in existence, and then the artist doing the comic you are reading gets sued by the company he’s making a comic about, because he doesn’t have the rights to the font.
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There was a fun article yesterday about a guy dealing with the Monotype shakedown.
I can't figure out how to strip this weird Voyager url handler to the Lemmy post, so here's the actual post
https://www.insanityworks.org/randomtangent/2025/11/14/monotype-font-licencing-shake-down
It’s also worth noting that in the case of games in Japanese, it’s not so easy for developers to find alternatives. While games using English can rely on system UI fonts, cheap commercial fonts or open-source options, the sheer number of characters used in Japanese means high-quality fonts are extremely difficult and expensive to make, so few affordable alternatives are available.
There's already a decent selection of high quality, freely available Japanese fonts here: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan
Free for commercial use?
Yeah:
Yes, you can use them commercially, and even include them within a product that is sold commercially. Usage and redistribution conditions are specified in the license. The most common license is the SIL Open Font License. Some fonts are under the Apache license or Ubuntu Font License. You can redistribute open source fonts according to those conditions.
https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#can_i_use_any_font_in_a_commercial_product
I'm guessing the problem is they want a relatively unique font to avoid looking the same as other games, and then once they've chosen their font they're pretty much stuck with it unless they're willing to change the look of their game (for live-service games at least). A number of the fonts there might work for new stuff though.
The worst rent seekers come for everything
"Font" and "licensing" are not words that belong together.
"Oh, I took the alphabet and made it slightly different - you know, like every single person who ever learned how to write - only I did it on a computer so now you have to pay me forever if you want your computer to write like mine does".
It's artwork, like any other visual element in a game.
The problem is price-gouging. Japan should set national maximum rates. You drew every fucking kanji in a cool new style? Great, here's some money. Emphasis on some.
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Font and alphabet are not the same thing.
Obviously nobody can or should own the letter E, but you pretend that the font creator's work adds nothing to that.
Someone had to do the work to make it look nice, beyond just being an E.
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Seriously. I would work very hard on my own font before I would pay to license one.
I wonder if it's easier now than it was when I was in highschool. 🤔 I remember wanting to make my own "hand written" font after getting a scanner for the first time and it was an ordeal.
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Owning literal letters has got to be the dumbest shit I've heard in my life. Fucking leeches.
They own a font, which is a way of writing the letters. Wondering though, how many Japanese fonts are there?
I remember back during the NFT hype cycle how people were claiming they'd patented particular shades of color and were selling rights to them on the blockchain.
I gotta wonder who even enforces this shit. Where do you go to register a font-type you claim you own that looks shockingly similar to a font people have been using since the printing press was invented? So much of this just feels like vexatious litigation. "Ah, yes, that's actually my 'a' and you need to pay me $20k to use it".
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Then use a free OFL-licensed font. Or cooperate to commission your own fonts to share among this consortium.
Really a non-issue if you're not stupid.
So design a couple fonts. It ain't rocket science.
Japanese fonts are much harder to make than English fonts. Thousands of characters and all that.
Admittedly I'm not sure if it works for Japanese, but English has online tools you can use to print out a sheet to write out every character and scan to turn into a font file. Would be surprising if it didn't exist for Japanese.
So ultimately you probably just need someone with neat handwriting.
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Kanji has over two thousand typical characters. Feel free to contribute several to open-source fonts.
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I don't think that a single product whose price has multiplied by 50 times at once has ever been successful. Shit, even small price increases on streaming services over time cause people to resort to privacy (as we all should). 50 times at once is fucking insane. I don't think that any reasonable developer will actually be buying this shit, because there's always better alternatives available. This is fucking stupid.
Its more likely they increased the price and immediately starting shaking down anyone who was paying for the old license price. Its a frustrating scummy tech company "strategy" that unfortunately works because someone at a developer or publisher will be willing to pay the hike if it means avoiding any legal battle.
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Lol font licensing, I will now copyright the letter "E" in all its forms.
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