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.
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.
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.
Soon they are going out of business anyway since they will be replaced by generative AI (which will look the same)
Shameless plug: https://fonthero.com - gen AI fonts, free while in beta ;)
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...
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
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!".
Arial is licensed font, distributed by monotype.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging#Consolidation...
https://www.monotype.com/company/press-release/fontworks-pla...Fontworks’ team, type inventory, IP, technology, and services will join global type specialist Monotype–Monotype’s first acquisition in Japan.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.
Who are they defrauding? Everything being done here is legal. There is no victim.
The commons. They profit by making everyone else worse off. We should have a specific name for that sort of economical behavior. “Leeches”?
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?
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.
I know Noto Sans can render just about everything, and has a permissive license:
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.
Noto Sans is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, which allows for free use, modification, and distribution, as long as the modified fonts remain under the same license. However, the fonts cannot be sold on their own.
Key Features of the SIL Open Font License:
* Free Use: The fonts can be used freely in both personal and commercial projects.
* Modification: Users can modify the fonts, but modified versions must remain under the same license.
* Embedding: Fonts can be embedded in documents and software.
* Restrictions: Fonts cannot be sold on their own but can be included in software packages for sale.
* Availability: Noto Sans fonts are available for download from various platforms, including Google Fonts and GitHub.
This licensing structure supports a wide range of applications while ensuring that the fonts remain accessible to users globally.
do not speak unless spoken to, clanker
If any of us wanted to hear what ChatGPT had to say, we would have prompted it ourselves.
AI sludge
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
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.
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.
Why did they rent the fonts instead of buying in the first place?
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:
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.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).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.
> 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....
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
Isn’t it then fair that a company charges 20k instead of 400? Since it’s so much more work.
It’s wonderful to see capitalism work so well. First you sell cheap to create vendor lock-in and undercut your competition.
Then once you have a monopoly, you hike up the price. Until a government authority comes along and introduces state sponsored competition or declares you “too big to fail”.
Rinse and repeat.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
What a bereft way to produce beauty. "This grey slop is good enough, isn't it?" Christ, people, let's be human again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do not know the market well; very interesting, thank you.
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.
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]
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.
That's a bit of a jump isn't it?
