this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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Japanese devs face font licensing dilemma as leading provider increases annual plan price from $380 to $20,000+ (www.gamesindustry.biz)
submitted 18 hours ago by versefedi@feddit.org to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 69 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Is it Monotype?

Yes, it’s Monotype. For those who don’t know, they are an illegal international monopoly that aggressively buys up all competitors for the purpose of extorting users like this. It is their entire business model and they have been allowed to get away with it for over a decade because of how well they’ve hidden themselves.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 24 points 16 hours ago

they took their name seriously

"There can only be one type"

[–] Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 84 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

Yet another reason to use and support open fonts.

Idk how many fonts are typically in a game but at $20k a pop, I suspect you could hire your own designer or collaborate with a few other small studios to design a few open game fonts.

[–] skibidi@lemmy.world 25 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

The problem is Japanese has so many characters - typically a font would need 5-6000 glyphs to be usably complete - that it isn't easy to create new fonts.

English ASCII is 96 characters, for reference. A designer can crank out a new thematically-appropriate font in a week.

[–] Mongostein@lemmy.ca 7 points 12 hours ago

They might even need 6-7 thousand glyphs

[–] towerful@programming.dev 23 points 17 hours ago

I think the collab would be more likely.

Ideally the government would create public domain fonts for their official languages.
If they publish in that language then they should support the font for that language.

Funding such an endeavour as a single studio/designer would require making over 6000 characters for the font ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208 ).
I'm sure modern unicode could do wonders to reduce that number (kanji has ~2,000).

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 10 points 15 hours ago

20k per year

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 41 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

I really don't get this strategy, it sounds like "we'd rather make $0 than $380" to me, unless they're really the only font out there and paying a designer for 6 months still can't get the job done.

[–] vateso5074@lemmy.world 39 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

If even one company opts to keep paying the license, that makes up for over 50 cancellations. They need less than 1/50 of their current licensees to continue paying to break even.

It's shitty, but it's basically a company taking themselves out of an entry-level market to extract more money from the types of clients where $20,500 is a rounding error.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 33 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

This is what most companies seem to be aiming for these days as well, along with business-to-business sales as opposed to business-to-consumer sales.

For a long time now, many companies have stopped trying to increase profits by increasing the customer base, but rather are shrinking the customer base with intent to make up the difference and then some with increased costs.

I did some back of the napkin math on the price increases for Xbox Game Pass the last time around, and the numbers were basically that they could lose about a third of their customers for Game Pass and still break even, so as long as they lost less than a third of their customer base, they were still creating more profit than before. They would need to be pushing losing fully half of all subscribers for it to make a negative dent on their profits.

This is late stage capitalism. This is rent extraction where they are indeed happier to make $0 because their customer base was already so vast that they can afford to have a significant portion of those customers bail and they will still make money.

[–] rem26_art@fedia.io 5 points 8 hours ago

its pretty rampant these days. My dad had been using a web hosting company since the 90's, and recently they got bought by some investment bank that just raised prices about 6x with barely any warning. He had to scramble to migrate the bulk of the stuff he had on there to somewhere more sane.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

I'd argue that the ratio needs to be much higher than 1/50 to compensate for the increase in risk. It's a lot easier to lose a handful of customers than hundreds. And this increase doesn't look good at all for the customers that stay.

[–] MotoAsh@piefed.social 10 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Capitalists are only interested in quarterly profits, not this "long term sustainability" BS. Just look at oil companies and global warming. They'd rather literally destroy the planet with the status quo than innovate a long term solution.

[–] bizarroland@lemmy.world 2 points 17 hours ago

Also, there's probably a lot of money to be made in being a font hunter for these companies. You find a company that has infringed on the font holder's rights. You bring that information to them. You get permission to sue on their behalf and then reap the rewards. And most companies will fork out the $20,000 rather than spend $50 or $100,000 on Litigation, and the font rights holder will catch the $20,000 on the year after for free

[–] BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 9 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

Fonts cannot be easily removed or replaced. Sometimes for technical reasons and sometimes for branding or operational reasons. So you pay their extortion or they sue you and get it anyway. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They are the comic villain kind of evil.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 6 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

to be fair, anyone using a font for branding that requires an annual subscription, put themselves in that spot. I think the reasons would be technical in this case. But they're basically betting that $20k/y in a couple years couldn't pay for the efforts to replace it, and I think that's really risky.

[–] BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 7 points 16 hours ago

Monotype is functionally an international monopoly. More than Luxottica, but for many of the same reasons. If the small selection of open source fonts don’t do what a company needs, then their only option other than Monotype is to have a font created. Monotype owns almost everything font related. Companies, fonts, everything.

[–] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 22 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Use an open font. Problem solved. Can I please have the 380 bucks annually now?

[–] warmaster@lemmy.world 6 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Build an open source & paid cloud hosted service that can sync OFL licensed fonts through an API, GUI, GIT and you'll be swimming in cash. Just make sure it's easy for casuals & devs and works for both individuals and teams.

There are projects similar to this, but nothing nearly this level of usable by everyone.

[–] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago

Why the hell would anyone need to host free fonts? A proper OS has them in the repos. Oh right - there's still people who believe the diarrhea coming from MicroLimp is a "proper OS" :/ especially corporate IT departments :(

[–] Jumbie@lemmy.zip 28 points 18 hours ago

Damn, they got Shkrelied.

[–] magnetosphere@fedia.io 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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.

Regarding this particular problem, I’m on the side of the gaming industry on every issue except this one. It’s sheer insanity not to own everything involved with your company’s identity, ffs. That’s just a monumentally bad decision with obvious, foreseeable risks. I will shed no tears if a big studio has to go through an expensive rebrand because of their own incompetent decision making.

That being said, I don’t know anything about Japanese font licensing besides what’s presented in this article. If anyone has important nuance to add, please do!

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 2 points 13 hours ago

Apparently unlike Latin alphabet fonts Japanese fonts are very hard to make due to the sheer number of characters, so there's fewer of them.