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.

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jjmarr 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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exmadscientist 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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!".

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brailsafe 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	eloisant an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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junon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	atomicfiredoll an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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

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sexeriy237 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

its the default

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CountVonGuetzli 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Arial is licensed font, distributed by monotype.

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29athrowaway 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	Aachen 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		... is an Apache-licensed metrically-compatible alternative, for everyone else who doesn't already know what an Armio. is

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w-ll 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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cbolton 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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eloisant 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	djmips an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Can it be done for $20,000? Or if that's too low then multiple game studios should team up.