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.”)

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

A few hours ago, [0]

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

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.