Japanese Devs Face Font Licensing Dilemma as Annual Costs Increase From $380 To $20K (gamesindustry.biz)
- Reference: 0180272033
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/03/0649236/japanese-devs-face-font-licensing-dilemma-as-annual-costs-increase-from-380-to-20k
- Source link: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-devs-face-font-licensing-dilemma-as-leading-provider-increases-annual-plan-price-from-380-to-20000
> Japanese game makers are struggling to locate affordable commercial fonts after one of the country's leading font licensing services [1]raised the cost of its annual plan from around $380 to $20,500 (USD). As reported by [2]Gamemakers and [3]GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game license plan at the end of November. The expensive replacement plan -- offered through Fontwork's parent company, Monotype -- doesn't even provide local pricing for Japanese developers, and comes with a 25,000 user-cap, which is likely not workable for Japan's bigger studios.
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> The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters. UI/UX designer Yamanaka [4]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. 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.
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-devs-face-font-licensing-dilemma-as-leading-provider-increases-annual-plan-price-from-380-to-20000
[2] https://gamemakers.jp/article/2025_11_18_123775/
[3] https://www.gamespark.jp/article/2025/11/30/160034.html?
[4] https://x.com/KY_creator/status/1993926902277616015?s=20
Closed source software and assets are a bitch. (Score:3)
Closed source software and assets are a bitch. If only someone had warned them.
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There aren't many good open source fonts for Japanese. There weren't even that many good ones for Latin languages, until Google started releasing some under free licences.
By "good" I mean good coverage of all characters, proper keming, good hinting so that they render well and consistently on screen and in print, etc. It's a lot of work, and Japanese has a lot of characters.
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> keming
I see what you did there.
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> There weren't even that many good ones for Latin languages, until Google started releasing some under free licences.
Microsoft actually released a set of "Core Fonts for the Web" back in 1996, which while proprietary was available for free distribution with certain caveats.
Linux systems all had a way to get them - they often consist of a script to download the original font packages and then extracted them for use on Linux desktops. This greatly improved the typography so it was popular on Linux systems to i
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That's insightful, what open source alternatives do you propose? There's hundreds for our alphabet, but there's fuck-all out there for Japanese / Chinese, many thanks to literally thousands of glyphs existing in the language.
Here's one character [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] just one of the several thousands which has more strokes than the entire Latin alphabet, Greek alphabet, including both lower case and upper case combined.
There's multiple orders of magnitude more complexity here with multiple order
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taito_(kanji)
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> That's insightful, what open source alternatives do you propose? There's hundreds for our alphabet, but there's fuck-all out there for Japanese / Chinese, many thanks to literally thousands of glyphs existing in the language.
Sounds like the sort of thing the governments of Japan / China ought to tackle. Do it once on the public dime, then freely license it (or open source it), and you've eliminated one cost for entire industries. It becomes a public good, like GNSS.
Will it work everywhere a font is needed? No, but neither does it need to be.
English (Score:1)
I know this will be modded troll......but seriously, if everyone would agree to use English, this problem goes away.
Make a serious, world wide push to put English first and a lot of issues go away. Keep other languages as secondaries. Make English the language of business and commercial culture.
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English /is/ the language of business and commercial culture, although Chinese will probably overtake in a few decades.
But this is about fonts in end-user product, and if you think that Japanese companies should makd Japanese games for Japanese people in English language, you have a tough sell ahead of you...
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To make his suggestion at *least* vaguely closer to reasonable, even if not there, could just say text will be in the phonetic scripts. So maybe not Kanji, but sure, Hiragana and Katakana.
If it is true that no one will reasonably provide fonts for cheap to cover the thousands of Kanji, you could still be in native language with a manageable scope by sticking to the phonetic scripts.
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"Chinese will probably overtake in a few decades"
i doubt this, mostly because one is more difficult to use/universally then the other.
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> if everyone would agree to use English, this problem goes away.
I suppose it's doable, if you have enough non-commercial fonts available for every conceivable use. But it would be cultural annihilation on a scale never before seen. What if all of humanity only ate chicken eggs from now on (you can survive on them so why not), or if we got rid of all music except 'Yesterday' by The Beatles.
Is that a world you would want to live in?
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Do you only know one language? Particularly for local content with local concepts it can be nontrivial to translate some ideas effectively in another language. I'm not even very good at another language and it is funny how often it is easier to read and understand than it is to translate. It (along with some 'control of the masses") is one of the reasons that various religions either proscribe or are hesitant to translate their core texts to other languages.
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Not trolling at all, but fairly typical of unilingual english speakers.
Multiculturalism is as important as biodiversity, and for the same reasons.
Every one that is not part of the dominant cultural landscape understands this, because they've had to fight to protect their language/culture all their life. Those who are born in the dominant culture don't. And I can't blame them for not understanding, but I can blame them for not wanting to understand.
Unilingual speakers all seem to think that languages are jus
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Op here. I know several languages.
Let AI do it! (Score:4, Funny)
Just vibe-code the font! What could possibly go wrong?
Seriously though, this sounds like it's time for the industry to cooperate on creating some open-sourced default fonts and technology to make it easier to edit (and share) new fonts.
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Google already has: [1]https://fonts.google.com/ [google.com]
Not all made by Google, but all open source.
If you filter by language you can see that some languages are not very well covered.
[1] https://fonts.google.com/
Two problems (Score:2)
It seems like there are two unrelated problems here. First, TFA implies that this is affecting existing games. That is truly a licensing issue, and I suppose a Japanese legal expert would need to chime in: Can a font developer change the licensing conditions for an existing product? It seems to me that this should not be possible.
The second issue is really more of a non-issue. If a studio cannot find an "affordable commercial font", then they should just use a free font. Designers obsess way too much over
vmware has an few lawsuits over stuff like that (Score:2)
vmware has an few lawsuits over stuff like that
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OEM licenses for fonts are not always perpetual. These Japanese companies probably had licenses that expired and got screwed when they had to renew. This kind of licensing is often beneficial for the licensee because they can buy a less expensive license then replace dated fonts in their products with new ones every few years.
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> Can a font developer change the licensing conditions for an existing product?
If the licence was for a specific period of time (say, 2 years) with no term that the renewal has to be at the same price (or not be more than such and such higher than the original price) the font owner doesn't have to offer the same terms for a renewal. They don't care you have integrated their font in a "live service" game that you keep making available from your website or Play Store/App Store account. As long as you keep maki
say no to arabic numerals (Score:1)
[1]https://youtube.com/shorts/TnO... [youtube.com]
[1] https://youtube.com/shorts/TnO1VnDTXtE?si=qWfh98FlztP0eqBl
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As an aside, what the "use a free font" people here don't understand is that using an obscure proprietary font makes your product's text look unique without having to hire someone to create a bespoke font for your product (which can be expensive for Japanese fonts due to the number of even commonly-used characters, as others have noted). Instead, if you use one of the 5 or so good royalty-free Japanese fonts means most people will figure out you are using a common font.
This is PE assholes fucking stuff up again. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not typical of the font industry. Most type designers are solo practitioners or small studios that license their work directly and treat customers well. The asshole in question here, Monotype, is owned by a private equity firm that overpaid for it, then bought some small font companies, and is now trying to sell the combined company for a markup of billions of dollars. But Monotype's revenues were hit hard by Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts, so they are trying to make up for it by dramatically increasing licensing fees. The higher prices have turned off customers which is hurting sales. They also tried and failed at AI. And their distribution agreement with type designers got nasty so they have lost some popular typefaces that used to be sold on MyFonts. Now Monotype is floundering and has been laying people off. Nobody wants to buy the company and it is now probably worth less than the owners paid for it. What Monotype is doing to these Japanese developers is going to bite them in the ass; AI for rapidly developing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts is right around the corner and in a few years Monotype will end up in a price war with smaller rivals, which they will not win.
Are there really no PD Asian fonts? (Score:2)
I would have thought by now, after 40 years of computerization, that there would be some robust Asian language fonts available in the public domain or perhaps licensed through government agencies to promote their use.
All the way back in the 1980s, I was involved in a Japanese/Chinese/English photo-typesetter project using what I believe were freely available font sets.
Seems like the Japanese game companies should switch to Google or MS fonts. $20K/year in Japan is someone's salary.
Clear Monopolistic Behavior (Score:2)
This article is a cry for the Japan Fair Trade Commission to take Monotype to court ... which it should.
those japanese... (Score:1)
they never heard of open source fonts ?
Making a note... (Score:2)
Own any font that is key to my corporate identity.
Re: Making a note... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's easy enough for Latin or Cyrillic alphabets. Have an intern design a font for you. I'm oversimplifying the complexity here to a ludicrous extent. But then Asian languages need 3 to 7 thousand unique glyphs for a given project. You either get the free noto font from Google or make a deal with the devil. The selection of free options is limited and it might not work well aesthetically. Then there implementation factors like good scaling, contrast, interoperability...
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Increasing the price two orders of magnitude all at once does seem like it'll lead to a rush to get an LLM to crap out legally distinct generic equivalents to those in short order, even if it does a bad job.
Re: Making a note... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it reasonable for a (chain of-) provider(s) to suddenly increase licensing costs? Surely the work has been done already.
I'm not sure "we've suddenly become much greedier" or "we think you can be coerced into paying more now your business depends on our fixed-effort-ongoing-cost product" are customer problems.
The licensing cost used to attract a customer should get locked-in until something fundamental changes.
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> Is it reasonable for a (chain of-) provider(s) to suddenly increase licensing costs? Surely the work has been done already.
To be clear it's not that they "increased" the cost, it's that they specifically eliminated a cheaper plan that the industry was relying on. Yes ultimately it's a distinction without a difference, but I really wonder why games specifically were getting a discount in the first place?
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> I really wonder why games specifically were getting a discount in the first place?
The effect is to hook them in when it's affordable then bait-and-switch FTW!
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Even if replacing it with a free alternative is possible, there's still the issue of testing that everything still works. Imagine a nice laid out document of some sort where time and effort has been made so that content breaks across pages nicely, captions fit appropriately, etc. such that it's a pleasing document to read. Now change the font and see if that document is still of the same quality. It may still be readable, but subtle shifts and changes will make some aspects of it worse.
A UI might be badl
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Microsoft's popular Arial font was created to have the exact same dimensions and spacing as Helvetica. Font designs and things like spacing aren't protected by copyright law, only the actual code that defines the fonts, the font file, is.
The Microsoft version renders nicely on screen, and be substituted for Helvetica in print, and was much cheaper than licencing Helvetica itself. Apple did later licence Helvetica, but it looks crap on screen when rendered using their mediocre font rendering code.
Anyway, the
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your points about the need to retest are valid but ...
> A UI might be badly broken if text flows off screen or becomes obscured by some other component.
... that's just an aficionado level layout problem, worth fixing anyway. wcsfo: write crap software, find out. a layout should never make strong assumptions about text content length or size. ofc there will be always limits, but if a simple font substitution causes an overflow the leeway is nonexistent or ridiculously low, or there is no layout system at all, and that's just a shitty ui. it's far easier to bump into those limits with e.g. localization or
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Or even just good old fashioned human-driven competition. A 60x price increase will draw new competitors. I'm not saying this is easy and I could do it in a weekend or a year, but still, this is not rocket science.
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Also true, i mean anyone licensing half a dozen fonts could in-house it for less on FTEs making fonts, a competitor licensing at a ten fold increase over the original price would remain a bargain and have plenty of market to capture.
Re: Making a note... (Score:2)
Only 600 or so primatives make up the written languages derived from the Chinese "bone script", and only a few primatives make up 99% the characters. A rule based system could make quick work of rendering the five thousand or so logographics in common use from the primatives. We have the cpu cycles for it now.
Re: Making a note... (Score:2)
WTH is "primative", do you mean, primitive?
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it means samsung's phone spell correction wins over English, sperg-boy.
Linguists call them "radicals". bÃjiÃn is what the Chinese call them, and I can't wait to see what Slashdot's ancient code does with that when I hit "submit"
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Sure, but the primitives are drawn with differences which are often subtle, but which make a huge change in legibility and aesthetics, when in combined kanji or hanzi. This is true in hand drawn or high resolution printed characters, but becomes a lot more important for fonts which are rendered with much lower resolution. For decoding, it's a cool shortcut, but for creating them the results will not be great.
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One can somewhat mitigate this with Japanese specifically, as it uses only ~2000 or so Kanji if I remember correctly; and by and large even those are composed of regular radicals; plus hirigana, katakana, and furigana.
Not to discount how challenging it would still be though - it still remains a large number of characters that need individual testing once all of those components have been put together.
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Japanese uses 2136 official characters, the JÅyÅ Kanji, yes. But they are not enough. There are also the JinmeiyÅ kanji, a few thousand names which have to be known to be able to read and write. Basic proficiency is often seen as the JÅyÅ Kanji plus around 1000 names. Expert proficiency is at over 3000 names, for some 6000 total characters.
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I think this is more of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Monotype is the parent and it seems they only license these fonts to websites or individual users per year. They have something about the amount of advertisements you can get off websites using their fonts?
What might of happened is the Japanize company Fontworks LETS sublicensed the fonts from Monotype with a custom license to sell them to game makers, and some reason the licensee expired or maybe it wasn't profitable. Just a
Re: Making a note... (Score:1)
Monotype is the largest OEM font licensor in the world. Nobody knows more about font licensing. There is nothing about game licensing on their web sites because they negotiate OEM licenses on a case by case basis.