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.

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GoblinSlayer 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	omnimus 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's Palo Alto equity firm HGGC so you are totally right it's Oracle playbook not a mistake.

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kouteiheika 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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rvnx 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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jacobn 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Shameless plug: https://fonthero.com - gen AI fonts, free while in beta ;)

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xigoi 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The fonts seem to have little Unicode coverage (no Greek letters for example), which is one thing that I wouldn’t expect an AI to have a problem with.

	▲	RobotToaster an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Given that Chinese/Japanese characters are made from a limited number of strokes, generating them seems like an ideal application for AI.

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tecleandor an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No thanks. Not only for the AI, but I've tried to write a little japanese and all the fonts appear blank.

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wolfi1 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

and after beta?

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umanwizard 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Please stop plugging AI crap on HN. If the relevance of human creativity is indeed breathing its last gasp, let us enjoy it in peace.

And if not, then AI is overhyped and plugging it is even less justifiable.

Either way, just stop.

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irusensei 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Please don't be irrational. We all can make fun at clueless suits desperately throwing money at the AI buzzword furnace while still recognizing there are practical applications for it.

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

You can still make art for yourself.

Admittedly Pre-AI, someone might have spammed their font business and received a similar frustrated response.

Maybe it's more about the shilling?

	▲	rvnx 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There will always be a place for calligraphy, artisan, who place creativity, handcraft and art first. You can see it like pizzas: there will always be someone who actually makes these pizzas from scratch; grows his own tomatoes in his garden, does his own flour, does his own cheese, raises pigs, etc. But these are exceptions, maybe 0.001% - it gets very very expensive, these people do it for passion and art, not for money or scale. You need to pre-order your pizza weeks before, you will pay a lot and you are not sure what will be the final taste (hopefully tasty), and you buy a story and supports someone. On the other end, you have companies like Gustavo Gusto who produce 100'000 pizzas a day. Quality ingredients, great execution, convenient, immediate, available and cheaper than hiring someone. The irony is that the expensive and slow small artisan may actually make a worse product, than something which has been battle-tested on millions of people and whose supply chain has been controlled end-to-end. After all of that, the industrial fonts like Roboto are not that bad, and if the industrial people offer you to customize it in a couple of prompts, then this is the cherry on top.
	▲	omnimus 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's not about the shilling. It's about death of quality. As society we are self-destructing our culture using trash AI copies. It doesn't matter if it's fonts, code, movies or illustrations. Look at that service - the fonts are shit to meh but they are free. Corpo managers will of course want to squeeze every drop so they will push for free - especially as the AI gets close. So instead of allowing someone obsessive to produce highest quality output they can… we stop this by using stolen copy. In this can only lead to wiping any concepts of quality in our society while also robbing the people producing the quality work.

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thaumasiotes an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You know, I'd have to say that responding to a comment that says "Japanese font foundries are about to be replaced with generative AI" with a plug for your generative-AI fonts is about as on topic as you can be. I challenge you to describe a reason why that's a bad response.

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kmeisthax 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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...