Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k | Hacker News Reader

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

gamesindustry.biz

337 pointszdw202 comments

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.

Google fonts has about 2000 fonts with about 8000 total variations I believe. I pretty much refuse to believe that you can’t find the font you want there. Finding it is the hard part.

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.

When I select 'Japanese' on fonts.google.com the number of fonts drops from 1901 families down to 50. Selecting 'Hiragana and Katakana' raises the number to 81.

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.

I suppose you're counting the joyo kanji plus kana alphabets with diacritics. But the actual count of kanji is much higher, even if Japanese uses a relatively small number of characters for day-to-day writing.

Pretty much every native university student I met when I studied there, had passed the Kanji Kentei level 1 test. A certification of proficiency in around 6000 kanji.

Yeah nah imma call bullshit on that. Kentei 1 is notoriously difficult, only a few thousand people per year try it and the pass rate is single digits.

2100 I took from Wikipedia:

> Japanese primary and secondary school students are required to learn 2,136 jōyō kanji as of 2010.[4] The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though this includes tens of thousands of characters only present in historical writings and never used in modern Japanese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system

They might have passed some level of the kanken (kanji kentei) in school but it is unlikely to be level 1. The gap between level 1 and 2 is ridiculous.

A typical font contains around 7,000 characters. In everyday use, you rarely touch all of them—most situations stay comfortably within the realm of jōyō kanji. However, there are many edge cases, especially with personal names, where the required characters fall outside the jōyō set. Fonts must be prepared to handle all of these possibilities, including the less common name kanji.

> I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.

The ~2000 is the official count taught in schools, but the actually "commonly" used number in literature is around ~3000. And you actually want more than that, because people's names can use weird kanji which are used nowhere else.

On the other hand, the vast majority of kanji are actually composed of a limited set of "subcharacters". For example, picking a completely random one:

    徧  ⿰彳扁

The '徧' is composed of '彳' and '扁' arranged in a horizontal pattern. Unicode even has special characters (⿰,⿱,⿶, etc.) to describe these relationships.

So this actually makes creating a CJK font somewhat easier, because you can do it semi-algorithmically. You don't have to manually draw however many thousand characters there are, but you draw those "subcharacters" and then compose them together.

Has anybody ever actually implemented an algorithmically composed kanji font? Because it seems like a hugely complicated undertaking. There are rules of thumb for how characters are composed, but getting something aesthetically pleasing out of the end result is more an art than a science. Even Korean Hangul, which is way simpler, has all sorts of funky kerning rules.

Fully algorithmically? I have no idea, as I'm not really in the fonts business.

But I'm pretty sure they're not actually redrawing every character from scratch, and are actually reusing the subcomponents (at very least for normal fonts). But how much of that is actually automated - you'd have to ask actual font designers.

Yes. Arphic, for instance, calls them radical-based fonts.

Droid Sans Fallback used this strategy during Android 1.x-2.x era. Its successor Noto Sans don't do the same.

Although many kanjis can be algorithmically composed, manual adjustment of each character's shape is still necessary for production-grade fonts. For example, if you closely compare the 彳 radical between 徧, 行, and 桁, you'll notice subtle differences in width, stroke length, angle, and margin.

For 楷書 type fonts this may be true, but you ought to know there’s more to it, don’t you?

> For 楷書 type fonts this may be true, but you ought to know there’s more to it, don’t you?

With all due respect, this is the type of comment that really makes online discourse so exhausting.

Yes, I know! Unless you put up two pages of disclaimers and footnotes there's always someone who comes out of the woodwork and "um ackshually"ies you. It was only supposed to be a quick and dirty comment talking about the topic in general, and not an in-depth, ten page treatise on the subject.

If you have something to add to what I wrote, then please do so, but heckling random people who put up their comment up in good faith is not helping anyone.

Out of those, only Morisawa's BIZ UD, Sandoll's IBM Plex and Adobe's Noto families are of outstanding quality.

Motoya is also a reputable foundry. FONTDASU also, I guess. And Google's Zen.

But those are all text faces! The only display families are a few freebies from Fontworks which do not cover a lot of design range.

So, yes, hardly 2000.

mchusma - the article specifically mentioned that this is about Japanese fonts, and being able to use fonts which look the same as they used to, in the games in question. And that getting other fonts is a) time consuming, b) needs testing, c), and if they look different they're talking about having to re-brand the whole game(s) in question. A big PITA, in any case. They're aware that it's possible to find an alternative, it's just that this is not easy to do quickly, and quickly enough to avoid the $20k penalty.

> These are just variations on letters, there was some interesting stuff in the past but it’s over now.

I'm normally the last person to defend up, but there's some interesting stuff going on with svg fonts. I'm pretty sure there's only one or two true monoline fonts for instance.

Also high quality ligature support is still not that common.

It's not Monotype but HGGC, private equity firm from Palo Alto that has bought Monotype and every other type foundry they can get their hands on. They likely have strategy to completely corner the market and then turn things up.

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.”)

Oh my god, private equity firms are such life-sucking vampires.

Buy a great company, suck as much cash as they can before discarding the empty carcass.

I'd love to some deeper 60 minutes-like documentary about it. This perhaps might actually spark some legislation change

Doubtful. The call is coming from inside the White House.

and congress. and scotus.

owned lock and stock by billionaires

You may have heard of the 1987 Michael Douglas film "Wall Street"? Nothing has meaningfully changed since then.

Back then (even in Reagan's 1980s) the Michael Douglas character types were despised by society. Now they are emulated and mainstreamed. We are set to have more private equity than McDonalds. American Capitalism is all about capital extraction now, not value creation.

https://www.thedailyupside.com/advisor/investing-strategies/...

Is there a point to these private equity firms besides sociopathically ruining everything? Why are they allowed to exist?

The point is to make everything fungible, even you. How else will america reinvent slavery?

The point is short-term profits. The private equity firms vampirically suck a lot of money out of these companies as they ruin them, and keep the money they steal.

Arguably they shouldn't be allowed to exist: They use what seem to be loopholes in corporate law to run what are essentially embezzlement schemes. If a lone person runs an embezzlement scheme, that's possibly a felony charge. It shouldn't be a loophole that a company can do it just fine without repercussions when we know a lone individual doing it is a crime.

The two problems in why they are allowed to exist are enforcement and probably legislation. Legislation is needed to close any actual loopholes in the law and/or just explicitly say things like "Leveraged Buy Outs are illegal". Enforcement is getting courts to see this as a crime and prosecute it as such. They may be waiting for legislation before they feel confident enforcing it.

Fixing those problems is certainly easier said than done.

(ETA: Also some of this is classic Anti-Trust violations. Trusts/Monopolies are still illegal. Enforcement has been somewhat negligent in the US this century and some of these deals cross too many country borders making enforcement in general harder. In this specific case, a US private equity firm buying a Japanese company, who enforces the anti-trust issue, especially if the Japanese company was already a de facto local monopoly before joining the international one?)

They exist as a consequence of how company ownership works (i.e. that it can be bought and sold). You would need to figure out some quite specific wording to prevent this without also preventing all kinds of other kinds of transfer of company ownership.

In principle, private equity firms could be a net positive: they could take over a business that's failing or just not living up to its potential, and turn around the management of it to improve it for all concerned. They often market themselves on this concept. In practice it rarely seems to work this way, where either they fail to make any return on their investment or they basically do this kind of monopolising, short-term extortion of customers. Often both.

(Patrick Boyle has a video on them from the financial side if you want some details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfUOPDOLHvE TLDW: they often aren't a great deal for investors, either)

The thing is that tax on such businesses are too low. Same as it is happening on other areas, the negative effects to society have zero counter measurements. AI will take all work and the government will crash because lack of money? Who cares? Private Firm buys all houses in a region and force the market into a false sense of scarcity to inflate prices? What could possibly go wrong? Other companies being bought in bulks by big players to hold IPs while dismissing all employees with false pretense that they are losing money? Nothing to see here..

The fact that the cost of using gray area to hide and move money to not pay taxes has a predictable and slow movement is the best for those players.

Some really good options there. I did a deep dive a while back looking for small, independent, mostly European type foundries. There’s an incredible range of talent out there.

Will never give Monotype and the like another penny.

The problem is soon you will not even know which fonts are owned by Monotype/HGGC. For example they bought Colophon and Sharp type two famous independent foundries. When buying their fonts it still seems like they are independent.

Yeah the Sharp purchase was what got us.

Those independent companies can be eventually bought by PE and turned into more bombs, though, right?

They indeed can but licensing on fonts from most companies is perpetual. Especially from the independent traditional ones. So its possible they might be bought in future but the new owner can't change license retroactively.

Also there is very high chance they already got offer from HGGC and simply refused it, because some similar notably independent type foundries got bought recently.

What is a foundry?

Sorry. Its name for a company that designs/distributes typefaces. It is a relic from past to call it this. In the past those companies were not only designing the typefaces but also manufacturing the physical matricies that were cast from metal.

Its similar to how some people say leading to mean line height. Lead strips were used for space between lines of text.

Could it be true, the past companies, which held ownership on past products, still in a misconception about current world working, and overpricing products without considering the possible downfall?

No, type designers want their art to be used. The type industry until recently has been a fairly friendly one as only designers really cared about it.

I think it’s more likely that vulture capitalists have discovered a matket that they can ruthlessly exploit, extracting every last shred of value without giving the slightest of shits about its long term sustainability.

A company that designs fonts. In the past they cast said fonts in metal to create movable type, a foundry is a place where metal is melted and cast into various forms. A font foundry was thus a place that made the type for printing presses.

But digital don't need one. A designer can do it. But why there is a market dominance through legal license in this regard?

It's a ton of work to design a font. Any designer can do it, not any designer can do it well. It's a very small niche of overall design. That led to a few companies specializing in font design, and predictably private equity firms have been buying them out & raising prices. Customers will switch away, but this creates unexpected work to do so some might end up paying at least for a while.

You can commission a custom typeface (or a modification of an existing one from their library) and get the rights to them, so they're yours. It's expensive up front, but you own it after.

They should definitely look at moving to Public Utility and become owned by government.

> Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly.

Sure, if you need a custom font, you can pay someone to create it.

Once it exists, the creator has already been compensated fairly.

Why is it difficult?

What a wild take. Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made.

While it's possible to commission a custom font and many companies do eg. Apple, IBM, Airbnb, Bytedance, Vercel, Github, Mozilla etc. Some even make them open source. However it's not really a viable option for anyone other than the largest organisations as it's far more expensive and time-consuming than just getting a licence unless your scale is such that a commission would be cheaper.

> Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made.

Nothing wild about it. That's simply the reality of intellectual work. Only the first copy need ever be paid for. That is the true cost of creation. The cost of all subsequent copies is approximately $0 with 21st century computer technology.

All intellectual work is information. All information is bits. All sequences of bits are numbers. All numbers already exist in the abstract world of mathematics. We merely find them. A 20 kiB picture is just a number with 49,321 decimal digits. Creating that picture is just a process that somehow finds the right digits.

We humans are merely interesting number generators. We are anti-RNGs. Once the number has been generated, copying it is trivial.

Intellectual property exists to establish artificial scarcity. It's not real, it's completely made up and of questionable effectiveness.

Payment only ever makes sense before creation. People should be paid for their labor before they create, not for copies of the end result. Selling copies makes no economic sense.

Approximately no one would pay for the cost of any digital works in this model. A musician may take six months to compose a song. No one would pay 6 months salary for a song. This obviously leads to no one professionally creating anything.

My history professor shocked the whole class when he revealed that there was no music, literature, nor paintings before copyright laws were invented.

One person might not be able to pay for the entire costs of creation, but groups of people certainly will. We have the technology for this. Platforms like Kickstarter, Patreon, GitHub Sponsors all enable this.

So if I wanted to write some notes or edit a photo you’re saying I should pay a team of developers to write custom code for me up front?

Literally nothing works like that.

There’s a huge difference between creative work and intellectual property, and a huge difference between the cost of creation and the cost of distribution.

The cost of distribution approaches zero. Once it's made, it's not actually scarce anymore. Intellectual property laws are all about creating artificial scarcity in order to increase distribution costs so as to compensate for the creation costs. Sooner or later, reality will reassert itself: people will pirate your product whether the laws allow it or not, simply because they can.

The ideal intellectual economy would be based on patronage where large amounts of people liberally support the creators they like. That way creators get compensated for the labour of creation, not the final result. Historical opposition to patronage involves fear of suppression by rich elites but now we have crowdfunding technology that enables sufficient decentralization, mitigating that risk.

Information is the product of intellectual work (among other things); it is composed of bits but is not itself bits.

We aren't paying for the bits.

Information is bits and therefore numbers. To deny this is to create a covert channel for copyright infringement. Copying films is infringement but if I convert it to a number and pass it around suddenly it's not infringement anymore? They will never accept this, so information must be bits which must be numbers.

A font has approximately 6000 kanji characters. You could operate with some fraction of these. But still any reasonable time spend on each can add up to significant amount of hours. And you probably want this from reasonably skilled person and then add some review effort on top.

Using the name of these companies instead of the private equity gouging ghouls who see everything we use as a potential choke point for being a rent-seeking vehicles is silly.

Apparently they are planning to create their own machine learning model with all the font data they have gathered.

The exact thing happened to us, too. Bought a font from a small foundry which then got acquired by Monotype two years down the road.

They started questioning us and assumed we had pirated the font. Send them the old receipt and told them politely to fuck off.

Never heard of them again luckily.

Is there any legal obligation to send them the old receipt? I’d be tempted to just let them waste their time on it more.

Not sure, probably depends on how resilient your company and staff is. :-D

Marketing got very nervous though and wouldn't calm down, so I sent the receipt.

First place I worked at where we got audited, Monotype presented us with a bill in the high six figures. It came as a surprise as the entire product and tech team had turned over at least three times since it was set up and no-one knew anything about it.

It turned out we had got licences, but not for anywhere near the billions of pageviews we were putting through.

We quickly switched the fonts to open source analogues and got the legal team involved. The final bill was much less than their opening bid but still a lot. It would have been much more expensive if we hadn’t had the resources to negotiate.

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.

There used to be a meme of people thinking that the Japanese market was somehow inherently biased to domestic companies and unwilling to touch western products. When the reality is moreso that almost every western company that tries launching products in Japan assumes they can just crush the local competition and gets their shit kicked in for the trouble.

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...

Companies that think they can just copy paste what works into another country usually fail.

> 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.

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.

Soon they are going out of business anyway since they will be replaced by generative AI (which will look the same)

Looks like it's Oracle licensing strategy, not a mistake.

It's Palo Alto equity firm HGGC so you are totally right it's Oracle playbook not a mistake.

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

There’s the unifont, but it’s not really something you’d want to ship in a game. The main focus is apparently on making sure every character is covered, not that it looks nice.

Minecraft ships it I think?

Minecraft as an example of desirable graphic properties :D

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!

Even in Minecraft it looks bad. Some CJK characters are Serif for some reason.

When you're making a work of art (such as a game) you don't just want any old font, you want one that serves a particular aesthetic purpose.

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.

Part of the reason Arial is so dominant is because it's proportioned the same as Helvetica, meaning it can be swapped in to avoid licensing fees without affecting document layout.

I don't think any designer has cared about that in the last 30 years. Perhaps not ever.

Arial is popular because people see it and say "good enough!".

its the default

Here's my anecdotal, completely unfounded theory.

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.

The general public was often using Times New Roman or whatever their system's default sans serif font was.

But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles.

Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and Arial--almost fever pitch at times. iirc, Arial exists do to the popularity of Helvetica and the background of this goes back to the 1950s. It wasn't just where it was placed in the font selection menu, it was given top billing in that menu deliberately (in Windows.) If you're interested, I think the Wikipedia page for Helvetica (Font)[2] covers it fairly deeply.

That all said, I haven't heard it hotly debated for some time now. The explosion of freely available fonts; popularity of new font families like Open Sans, Noto Sans, etc; and the ability to add custom fonts on the web seems to have slowly killed off the discourse in the last decade or so. I'm not in those design circles as often anymore, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica

Ah yeah I had totally forgotten about Helvetica having such a history. Though I wonder what you mean by putting Arial in that position deliberately - if it was alphabetical (which I remember it being) do you mean that Arial was named as such that it started with A?

I don't mean that it was literally named for the dropdown, just that generally Helvetica was the cause and Arial was the effect. From what I know, it goes back earlier to when Monotype was providing fonts for IBM printers.

From what I know, Monotype was responsible for the name Arial (although IBM called the family Sonoran Sans Serif.) But, even at that point, the intent was to create something that would stand in for Helvetica.

I don't know that the name was selected deliberately to be ahead of Helvetica. But, it's not unheard of in branding to put your product ahead of or near the competition alphabetically. (It was especially important then because people were manually looking up things in phone books and libraries.) I wouldn't be surprised to hear that aspect was considered during naming.

> I don't think any designer has cared about that in the last 30 years. Perhaps not ever.

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.

Apple decided to have a font as close as possible to print, at the cost of a more fuzzy render on the low DPI screens of the time.

Microsoft decided to have a font adapted to computer screens, with characters that match the screen grid better for a crisp result.

It's not really "bad design and terrible typeface", but different choices with each their pro and cons.

Of course it's different now with high DPI screens.

You misunderstand my point.

My point is not that font substitution never happens (it quite clearly does). My point is that no print designer has ever thought "yes, I want Helvetica here, and sometimes we won't pay for Helvetica so sometimes it will look like Arial, and this is what I want". Probably back in the days of PostScript built-in fonts and font cartridges some people thought about that. But since TrueType and embedded fonts happened, I don't think a single designer has ever given a shit about these two fonts being metric-compatible instead of just, you know, picking one and designing with it.

Web design is its own beast and any web designer who wasn't designing, from day one, for different fonts possibly being used without even any regard for metric compatibility wasn't doing their job.

Sure ya, but I don't think it was implied that anyone was talking specifically about metric compatibility exclusively for print design though, just "metrics" compatibility for design in general, specifically game UI, which could be other kinds of documents transferred between people with varying fonts and OS installed

Arial is licensed font, distributed by monotype.

Arimo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts

... is an Apache-licensed metrically-compatible alternative, for everyone else who doesn't already know what an Armio. is

Sure but spacing shouldn't matter for multilingual games as you already make it dynamic for the local lang, aka why speed runners use certain locals. also some games that pack their own font let you throw a font file in the local path of the game to override the packaged font.

Why don't they pay someone to make a very similar looking font? Font design is not protected by copyright, and most fonts are also not protected by design patents as far as I know.

Because there are more than 2000 characters in Japanese, making a font is a huge work.

Can it be done for $20,000? Or if that's too low then multiple game studios should team up.

If you are creating a work of art that depends on a continued business relationship with others, especially one without solid contracts that won't let them change pricing on you, then you have no one else to blame but yourself.

I think we all depend on stable markets in one way or another

E.g. supermarkets suddenly charging the hundredfold amount? → Should have started a farm or made solid contracts if you didn't want be be dependant...

That is true for English games, but the vast majority of Japanese games use the same 3 or 4 fonts. Often they give the user the ability to change it. Or they just write menu systems in English if they want to stylise it.

Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging#Consolidation...

  Fontworks’ team, type inventory, IP, technology, and services will join global type specialist Monotype–Monotype’s first acquisition in Japan.

https://www.monotype.com/company/press-release/fontworks-pla...

Additional anecdote about Monotype pricing policies:

https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1jqqlm6/mon...

And after digging through the comments... Yup it's private equity again. PE buyouts should be considered criminal fraud.

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Reddit is weird these days. I'm not even sure how this is related to fonts.

I know Noto Sans can render just about everything, and has a permissive license:

https://fonts.google.com/noto

I am not sure if it's possible to parameterize it to have the look that game developers wanted.

A font like Noto Sans which is cold and nice for a text document isn't quite what game developers are looking for. A good font is one aspect of building atmosphere in a game, and a sterile font is detrimental to that.

There are quite a few open source or royalty free Japanese fonts (Google Fonts has 50[1]).

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.

[1]: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan

I grew up in russia and every localized game always had godawful ugly thin fonts. I would always watch foreign gameplay videos with jealousy cause they had beautiful latin fonts.

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.

I remember that PES6 was the only PES to get Polish translation. The start screen wouldn't render correctly because the font was missing the glyph Ś.

it's because whatever font stack to directx renderer middleware game engines were using was usually only developed for the latin script, probably the lowest common denominator of no diacritics either.

It's the same for some non-Japanese games who don't take the time to think it through, worse case scenario is when they use Chinese fonts.

Because Japanese and Chinese characters are slightly different, but Unicode decided to unify them under the same codes....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs

The same happens in reverse sometimes, e.g. the super skinny font in final fantasy pixel remasters:

https://images.rpgsite.net/image/da49c9a1/102696/original/FF...

Ironically, they had a better Latin font _in the Japanese language version_ for all the genre loan abbreviations like MP/HP/LV etc., (https://terimaland.com/Memory/Steam_FinalFantasyPixelRemaste...) so that image is comparing the modded in Japanese Latin font vs the font the game includes by default.

(They also have a retro blocky "pixellated" font option iirc, which doesn't have the super narrow widths)

They look like half-width characters. This is a historical issue, not a font style issue. You can check:

https://mailmate.jp/blog/half-width-full-width-hankaku-zenka...

Standard Latin characters are half width. Ｆｕｌｌｗｉｄｔｈ latin characters do exist, but that’s not the difference we’re seeing here, if anything that would make the Latin font in the English release “quarter width” except that’s not a real thing that exists. It’s just an ultra condensed font, and the fix is replacing the font files with more standard fonts, not some kind of special font to treat half width as full width.

Realistically it’s only katakana that you can make this mixup on. My desktop IME will let me type カタカナ or (reluctantly) ｶﾀｶﾅ, though it turns out iOS doesn’t have a way to type the half width kana, and IMEs have differing opinions on if they prefer full width digits, so you might see full width numbers like ５０００。

Alternately, imagine if all text in your favorite game was IP owned by some random third party that could ruin everything one or two years down the line.

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.

Sounds like one should be able to get a long way if you put down, say, 2 years of the new license fee and then never have to pay again

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

Most typefaces would cover a basic Sans (Helvetica/Liberation Sans) and a Serif font enough for the game to be playable.

The license before was attractive before. I guess they will be switching. Maybe also to free fonts. From the article: >UI/UX designer Yamanaka stressed that this would be particularly problematic for live service games; even if studios moved quickly and switched to fonts available through an alternate licensee, they will have to re-test, re-validate, and re-QA check content already live and in active use.

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.

You can't just "swap a font out" without redoing all the work.

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.

Interested in tangent replies to this, even if such fonts are artistically unsuitable for games - are open source fonts OK for Japanese? I understand that Unicode denotes single characters for both Chinese and Japanese (and Korean outside of Hangul?) even though there are differences between how nations write these 'single' characters, so the result is a Unicode font will look like a Chinese font, or a Japanese font, but not both.

How do the big Unicode OSS fonts like Noto, Deja Vu deal with this?

Noto Sans comes in SC, TC, HK, CJK JP and CJK KR variants. There's no Noto Serif for CJK characters, nor does Deja Vu support them.

> There's no Noto Serif for CJK characters

Yes there is: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+JP

Every variant is a different font. IMO Han unification is one of the greatest failures of Unicode.

> I understand that Unicode denotes single characters for both Chinese and Japanese (and Korean outside of Hangul?) even though there are differences between how nations write these 'single' characters, so the result is a Unicode font will look like a Chinese font, or a Japanese font, but not both.

This is "Han Unification", a terrible idea from early in the development of Unicode. The idea was so bad that the affected glyphs are now also given always-Chinese and always-Japanese Unicode points, making it possible to, for example, compare a Chinese character to a Japanese character in the same document.

But the fix exists. You can specify that you have no idea what you're trying to write by coding it as U+76F4 (直). Or you can specify a Chinese character by coding U+FAA8 (直). Or you can specify a Japanese one by coding U+2F940 (直). There isn't actually a reason you'd want U+76F4 - it's just a dead, useless unicode point - but we can observe here that my default font doesn't include a glyph for either U+FAA8 or U+2F940 even though U+FAA8 is by definition identical to U+76FA (since this is a Chinese font).

>There isn't actually a reason you'd want U+76F4

The fact that it was the only one that properly rendered for me is an actual reason.

And just think, that will be true about half the time!

You don't want U+76F4, you want buggy Asian fonts to be fixed.

(On second thought... did it render correctly for you? Did you check?)

Every single time I reload the page the other characters are a broken rectangle, so experimentally it's 100% of the time I'll need that character. What I want is to not see a broken rectangle. One can't say that U+76F4 is useless when it clearly is serving a use for my computer.

On default modern Android I get the same: Only U+76F4 renders, not the other two.

OP means it's the only one that renders at all. It could be wrong but the other two are just missing-glyph boxes which are definitely wrong. Those code points appear unusable as a practical matter.

IMO: quality wise, FOSS fonts are fine(n=1) - it doesn't have to be a proprietary font but do have to be the right ones of CJK.

- In cases with the Noto project, they've given up long ago on literal singular font in both name and file to cover every languages; they have bunch of variants as different fonts(TC,SC,HK,JP,KR,...), available as both individual files as well as combined files[1].

- In cases with most Latin fonts like Deja Vu - I think this is where bulk of "wrong font" problem comes from. They don't support CJK at all, and operating systems often handle fallback to system defaults for missing characters, but sometimes OS falls back into wrong CJK fonts and cause text mIshmashlnG[2] problems or show bunch of square placeholders(aka tofu). The latter is usually solved by installing Noto fonts, and former by specifying what fonts are to be used for fallbacks(anyhow it's done, it can be OS or game engine dependent).

- There are also bunch of domestically made fonts such as IPA Gothic; they usually only support the targeted one of CJK + ASCII(+ISO-8859-1). Most Japanese-English _bi_ lingual contents take this route, which had lead to curiosity by some as to why Japanese content creators appear to have unique and specific taste for fonts[3] - in fact they're just reusing the font files already in the project folder.

- For creative purposes such as games, FOSS fonts sometimes don't cut it, but that is not unique to the Japanese language.

1: https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/s/satob/20231... | https://archive.is/6qeVm

2: https://blog.enjo.life/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/fonts-and-... | https://archive.is/jSQzn

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dwSydGAJsk

unifont has cjk support, bitmap fonts work just fine for the integer domain. been using unifont system and app wide for some integer number of years now. i believe the only app that i use that does not have unifont is the game rimworld, but i haven't investigated to see if there's any fix for that. for qt based apps i believe you have to use the environmental variable QT_FONT_DPI=128 or something similar, where the 128 is double the DPI, which may be some bug that i got around that may be fixed now

The Monotype pricing change is brutal, but there’s a workaround. Derive new Japanese font families directly from public-domain sources.

I’ve been working on doing exactly that. Reconstructing clean vector glyphs from old metal-type Japanese books. The quality of those prints is surprisingly high, and they include thousands of kanji in consistent style. With some new technological innovations and a reasonable amount of hard work, you can produce a completely new, fully legal font family without touching any commercial IP.

The method I've devised is proprietary, but I’ll say this: it’s absolutely possible, and the output rivals modern JP fonts.

Given the sudden jump from ~$300/year to ~$20k/year for some devs, I expect more people to go down the “rebuild from PD artifacts” route instead of staying locked to a monopoly.

Indeed. Scan a book in public domain, feed into an online font generation service, pay somebody to clean it up.

A few hours later, you have a font you can use how you like. Is it as good? Probably not, but it's much cheaper.

Edit: oh look https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127400

Yes. I did see that other article. No the process we are using is not using AI. We are not using OCR either. We are using computational geometry and forensics methodology. No flatbed scanners. No sheet fed scanners.

This isn't like anything ever done before. It's entirely different and higher quality than any result you can get through AI or OCR.

I do agree that detailed work is required to do it correctly and produced high quality results. I'm not offhandedly saying "just do these simple things and bam perfection."

Wow that sounds incredible. I'm super into fonts, I understand the proprietary nature but if OCR isn't used and neither is flatbed scanning, does that mean the 3D model is obtained? I can't think of another method.

It's very cool, would love to see some fonts you have available whenever it's out!

The initial input is high resolution images using a DSLR and a macro lens, or at least it will be soon. Initial testing of the method has been done using 200mp images taken casually with a standard modern cell phone.

The underlying new computational geometry method can be extended to 3d but that isn't necessary for this application unless we also extract a 3d image of the page itself. For now at least we are not doing that as it would be even more complicated and finicky. Possibly for soft enough pages the letterpress imprint will deform the page enough that the deformation can be detected and help figure out where the original metal pressed and where the ink is due to page bleed.

Essentially what we are doing is taking high resolution photos, using computational geometry methods on those to extract the shapes, and then refining those shapes through a mixture of automation and manual labor.

The entire thing is called "Donkey Free" and will have information online in the near future. I just bought the domain ( donkeyfree.com ) for this 2 days ago; this is all extremely new. I'd like to release the resulting fonts under a license allowing free use for many purposes but we still need to think through that to figure out how to make that sustainable.

Sounds great, best of luck! Hope you make a Show HN post when it's ready

It's fascinating how different this challenge must be between Latin vs CJK.

How do you match up the scans with unicode entities? Human supervision and/or OCR? To what extent is the breadth and quality of OCR the limiting factor?

How do you define your target entity coverage?

Great questions — and you’re absolutely right that Latin vs. CJK is effectively two different universes in terms of reconstruction.

1. Latin vs. CJK differences Latin glyphs are structurally simple: limited stroke vocabulary, mostly predictable modulation, and relatively low topological variation. Once you can recover outlines and stroke junctions accurately, mapping to Unicode is almost trivial.

That can be done with standard OCR methods for Latin.

CJK is the opposite. Each character is effectively a miniature blueprint with dozens of micro-decisions: stroke order, brush pressure artifacts, serif style, shape proportion, and even regional typographic conventions. Treating it like Latin “but bigger” doesn’t work. So the workflow for CJK has extra normalization steps and more constraints, especially when reconstructing consistent glyph families rather than one-offs.

From a simple perspective, CJK has many characters with disconnected pieces that are still part of the same character.

2. How we match scans to Unicode entities We don’t rely on conventional OCR at all. OCR engines are optimized for reading text, not recovering the underlying design intent. Our process is closer to forensic glyph analysis — reconstructing stable structural signatures, then mapping those signatures to references.

This ends up being a hybrid: • deterministic structural matching • limited supervised correction when ambiguity exists • and zero reliance on any off-the-shelf OCR models

It’s not “OCR first, match later.” It’s “reconstruct the letterpress structure, then Unicode becomes a lookup.” OCR quality literally doesn’t limit us because OCR isn’t part of the critical path.

3. What determines coverage Coverage is defined by what we can physically access and reconstruct cleanly. For Latin, coverage is straightforward. For CJK, coverage is shaped by: • typeface completeness in the source material • the consistency of impression depth • survivability of fine strokes in early printings • and the practical question of how many thousand characters the original font designer actually cut

There’s no need for the entire Unicode set per book. The historical font only ever covered a finite subset. It is unfortunate that every book doesn't use every glyph, but not catastrophic because we can source many public domain books from the same era and eventually find enough characters matching the style.

In short: Latin is an engineering challenge. CJK is an archaeological one. OCR is not a bottleneck because we don’t use it. Coverage follows the historical material, not Unicode completeness.

Would love to hear or read more about this if it is public.

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).

I was wrong about Genshin Impact there. That said, I'm sure you can see the effect with, well, literally any video game or app that uses one of those fonts (including internationally with localization options). Either you're too small to afford it, or you can afford it but you have too many users.

Genshin is produced by a Chinese company, MiHoYo. And I think Monotype will have a much harder time trying to strongarm a PRC-based company if they decide to try this there.

> Monotype will have a much harder time trying to strongarm a PRC-based company if they decide to try this there

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....

Genshin's UI font is produced by Hanyi, not Monotype.

https://www.hanyi.com.cn/adminlte/ueditor/image/20230906/169...

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.

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

Never, ever buy this kind of stuff on a subscription. As a business you're often even easier to shake down than a consumer.

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

Creating new (really good looking) fonts must be brutal

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...

Why would a company pay for fonts?

1. Because fonts are works of art and any artist deserves to be paid. 2. Because there may not be a freely licensed font with the right aesthetics 3. Especially because Japanese fonts require much more work than Latn fonts, with not some hundred glyphs (a-zA-Z0-9 and punctuation), but with thousands upon thousands of glyphs

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?

Monotype does not have the same consolidation with CJK when compared to the virtual monopoly it has with Latin script typefaces.

They still have a healthy selection of competitive companies to choose from such as Morisawa, Iwata, Motoya, Ricoh, JIYUKOBO, DynaComware, Arphic, Sandoll...

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.

Maybe not for the full japanese characters set, but for an existing game, they could do it for the subset of characters they are using.

I don't think that's practical, because the subset would still be quite large. I did a quick analysis of the Factorio localiization files and found more than 1200 unique characters

This does sound like a perfect use case for "AI" tools however. It's literally style transfer.

Edit: though maybe grounds for a "rounded corners" style lawsuit, given the business style of the folk we are dealing with here.

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?

A few hours ago, [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127400

> What do I feel like custom font generation is one thing AI could be really good at

Probably because you're wrong. Anybody can make a font, making a good font is a highly under appreciated art form.

Have you seen the output of LLMs lately? It's not perfect, but I bet that with enough refinements they can create "art" just as well.

What a bereft way to produce beauty. "This grey slop is good enough, isn't it?" Christ, people, let's be human again.

My man, that battle is lost.

Only if you give up.

The latest Nano Banana is pretty good, but it's not perfect yet. And many font use cases demand perfect.

Maybe the next major update will be able to do it.

Fonts are not generated as bitmaps, anyone who doesn't see how AI can and will be good at font generation is a fool.

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.

Ask the models to create vector SVGs and you'll understand how far off they are on shapes.

I find that a “good” font is just whatever aesthetic people find popular, regardless of legibility.

perhaps when the clocks at https://clocks.brianmoore.com/ consistently make sense, AI could make a font.

Even then, I wouldn't want it making a kanji font. Consider 感 and 惑, both of which would be taught before high school.

Wow, K2 is killing it on this for me. Three minutes have been 100% correct now.

Haiku 3.5 had a one right too. But k2 apparently is very good at html and css.

Sounds like you don't know the CJK font market. AI assisted font design is nothing new and especially useful for CJK since there are so many glyphs. There are plenty of foundries openly advertising AI-assisted fonts, e.g. https://izihun.com/fontxiazai/ziti-2673.html

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.

I do not know the market well; very interesting, thank you.

Those fonts look awful in a hard to describe way. Font uncanny-valley? I feel like a barcode reader trying to OCR meaning out of ink blots.

Those fonts are completely indistinguishable from the average cartoon/artistic font from the 2000s which are definitely not created by AI. I don’t like most of them, but I don’t like most of the human-designed ones either. Plus AI-assisted fonts in CJK often means hand drawing a couple hundred characters, maybe more, then generating the thousands of remaining characters (I assume the current crop of SOTA models could change that, but these fonts have been going around for a while), so the odds are what you see in the samples are mainly or maybe even completely human-generated.

As I understand it you can't protect the appearance of a font so imperceptible differences can be made on a copy unless you do a design patent which only lasts 15 years and isn't always done. (In the US)

It would be pretty easy to make a font generator using LLMs and visual models.

Perhaps an old-school bitmap font would be within the realm of possibility, but I wouldn't be confident of GenAI's ability to go from sprite sheet to proper TTF with glyphs described as curve/points without a LOT of manual work - and especially not when we're talking about a language with complicated logographs.

AI fonts are nothing new. But you still need someone to manually check them and it's never one-shot. It makes no economical sense to do that instead of buying commercial fonts, which are ready-to-use immediately, when they only cost a few hundred dollars.

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.

Creating a CJK font seems exactly the kind of thing they're still bad at, and the results I got from just trying it on Gemini, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek pretty much confirmed that. This is like the whole "draw a clock" challenge except there are 2000+ common clocks and a bajillion more obscure ones, and regional differences like the grass radical[1]. You'd probably need to start from teaching it the principles like radicals, stroke weight, etc. as if it were a human calligrapher.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_140#Variant_forms

With all the advancement in AI, shouldn't it be easier to create new fonts?

What a bold suggestion (pun intended). Wouldn't this draw the ire of the people who are up in arms about AI art supposedly stealing from artists?

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

Oh no, live service game companies have encountered another predator. How sad.

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

that fucking robbery

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.

Why is font a challenge?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com