I’d be prioritizing a quick font swap for my assets if I were those devs. Wtf.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
This can quite appropriately be assigned as the top comment to sooo many articles/posts.
It frustrates me how often this is the most viable solution to problems these days.
The human race is really just sitting around waiting till this system collapses because the rich have taken everything and allow us nothing anymore.
Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.
I don’t mean to agree with that other person hating on kanji, but if they’re going to take on the task of making a new font they could potentially alter the writing system somewhat to simplify some things and/or extend versatility of some characters. A new evolution would be exciting.
鬱 has 29 strokes. People just write うつbecause they can understandably not be assed to write all that. So why not, if you have to go through the task of making an entire font, replace it with something people might actually write? You could come up with a new character in the tradition of hiragana’s origins, something uniquely Japanese.
Excellent time for the Japanese to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language.
edit: Yes, I’m poking fun at the Japanese for using logograms. If your take from this is that I’m saying the Japanese are bad and not that logograms are bad, ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
I was actually going to call it a removed writing, referencing how imperial units are known through non-Americans on the internet, but I already knew the word would be censored (yep, I didn’t write “removed”, lemmy did). In hindsight “functional” wasn’t the best pick, not because it’s “offensive” or whatever you may think (in fact, I find it surreal that anyone managed to find it offensive lol), but because it’s not poking enough fun at it… if I said “like a normal language” instead, would you be more outraged by the joke? It seems like a better pick for the future, so let me know - I’m sure I’m going to have more opportunities to poke fun at logograms, and also sure I’ll find more people addicted to being outraged trying to make it about race. So get here your quick fix, I’m basically Hitler.Why? And what constitutes a “functional language” to you?
Is the fact that they can read, write, speak, and understand the language not “functional” enough for you? The point gets across to the person receiving the message.
You can even translate it to a “functional language” of your choice, with some restrictions. Translation restrictions aren’t isolated to Japanese either, there’s lots of languages that have things which don’t translate well, or at all, to English.
… they already have two syllabaries. They’re not about to upend their whole writing system just to maintain foreign intellectual property.
-
that’s literally one of the most bigoted comments I’ve ever seen in the fediverse
-
your comment is in English, a language so non-functional it’s the only one that had to have spelling bees to get kids to learn its asinine rules
Uhh… Basically every language I can think of have had some form of childhood activity that pushed learning it’s asinine rules at some point in it’s history.
Cause fun fact.
Literally every language that has ever existed is batshit crazy, makes no sense and might as well be unhinged nonsense.
That’s not a monopoly English has. Not by a fucking long shot.
That guy’s comment is racist as fuck tho
The more i look into different languages, the more i feel different languages are just as complex as each other, with complexity put in different places
That guy’s comment is racist as fuck tho
Chances are high they hate it because they had to learn kanji in school or for work.
I also think it’s an excellent time for Americans to drop imperial units and use metrics like a functional measurement system - is this also racist?
No, that’s a whole new unrelated topic. Any other questions?
I think ideograms suck because they are an extremely bad writing system, and imperial units suck because they are an extremely bad measurement system… why is one racist and the other is not?
If someone around was still using roman numerals I’d also say it’s an excellent time to drop that system, but fortunately everyone already did.
edit: Bonus question: If I say it’s an excellent time to drop the Gregorian calendar do I win at racism for expanding it to the whole world?
The Chinese use ideograms so booo, but their local mix of lunar and solar calendar is great.I think ideograms suck because they are an extremely bad writing system
That’s nice, but what you originally said was that “the Japanese don’t have a functional writing system”, which is bigoted, because it constitutes an unreasonable belief/prejudice against a particular group of people (“the Japanese”). It’s an unreasonable position because the Japanese writing system is obviously functional, as millions of people use it to great effect every day.
imperial units suck because they are an extremely bad measurement system
This is not bigotry because it isn’t an unreasonable belief, and it doesn’t target/prejudice against one specific group (other than ‘imperial measurement users’, which isn’t really an identifying or culturally significant group).
Bonus question: If I say it’s an excellent time to drop the Gregorian calendar do I win at racism for expanding it to the whole world?
Bonus answer: no, bigotry targets/prejudices against a specific identifying group. “The whole world” doesn’t qualify as a group that you can be bigoted against. Hating everyone makes you a grumpy curmudgeon, but not a racist.
Hope this helps.
I think ideograms suck because they are an extremely bad writing system, and imperial units suck because they are an extremely bad measurement system
And I think you suck because you are an extremely bad person.
Equivalent statement right?
-
Like, haskell? But why?!
Monotype may as well be the mafia. My wife’s work had to deal with those assholes, too, after they bought the rights to some font. They’re just shaking companies down for cash.
after they bought the rights to some font.
Now That’s What I Call Capitalism
I would be burning fucking buildings down. I’d be at the top of the FBI’s most wanted list.
This would be an interesting comic strip. A company that has purchased all the fonts in existence, and then the artist doing the comic you are reading gets sued by the company he’s making a comic about, because he doesn’t have the rights to the font.
Put up or shut up
There was a fun article yesterday about a guy dealing with the Monotype shakedown.
I can’t figure out how to strip this weird Voyager url handler to the Lemmy post, so here’s the actual post
https://www.insanityworks.org/randomtangent/2025/11/14/monotype-font-licencing-shake-down
It’s also worth noting that in the case of games in Japanese, it’s not so easy for developers to find alternatives. While games using English can rely on system UI fonts, cheap commercial fonts or open-source options, the sheer number of characters used in Japanese means high-quality fonts are extremely difficult and expensive to make, so few affordable alternatives are available.
There’s already a decent selection of high quality, freely available Japanese fonts here: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan
Free for commercial use?
Yeah:
Yes, you can use them commercially, and even include them within a product that is sold commercially. Usage and redistribution conditions are specified in the license. The most common license is the SIL Open Font License. Some fonts are under the Apache license or Ubuntu Font License. You can redistribute open source fonts according to those conditions.
https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#can_i_use_any_font_in_a_commercial_product
I’m guessing the problem is they want a relatively unique font to avoid looking the same as other games, and then once they’ve chosen their font they’re pretty much stuck with it unless they’re willing to change the look of their game (for live-service games at least). A number of the fonts there might work for new stuff though.
The worst rent seekers come for everything
“Font” and “licensing” are not words that belong together.
“Oh, I took the alphabet and made it slightly different - you know, like every single person who ever learned how to write - only I did it on a computer so now you have to pay me forever if you want your computer to write like mine does”.
It’s artwork, like any other visual element in a game.
The problem is price-gouging. Japan should set national maximum rates. You drew every fucking kanji in a cool new style? Great, here’s some money. Emphasis on some.
It’s debatably artwork. Every single person has their own handwritten “font” - more than one if you write cursive and block letters. A font doesn’t have a message or a meaning, it is just a means for conveying information through text. I’m sure you can produce several examples of specific fonts that qualify as “artwork” (though it’s just a numbers game since there are literally hundreds of thousands of different fonts on the web, if not more) but that doesn’t prove that every font is automatically “artwork”.
We could also make the claim that every drawing is an artwork depending on how we define the word, but that doesn’t mean that every nine-year-old who draws an “original character” that’s just a green Sonic the Hedgehog should be able to use the legal system to bully other people because he’s an “artist”.
It’s absogoddamnlutely artwork. As much as the game itself, as mere software, is artwork. Someone put a ton of tedious work into every font you consider boring. Typography is a whole field of study, balancing aesthetic and practical concerns, and you want to roll your eyes and insist that only Wingdings is real art.
We could also make the claim that every drawing is an artwork
Yes.
These aren’t scribbled alphabets - which by the way are really fucking hard to do, when every copy of a letter has to look the same and still feel handwritten. These are letterforms conveying a particular tone, in use by industry professionals, for three thousand characters. Japanese has like three and a half alphabets to start with, and then Kanji is a whole mess of stolen Chinese ideograms. And they’re fucking complicated.
If you think you can bang that out with the effort of a child’s crayon doodle, to the quality necessary for commercial video game projects, I invite you to try. Apparently it’d come in handy.
As much as the game itself
I’ll agree it’s art but this take is so asinine.
If you don’t think code is art, we are about to have a screaming row.
I made exactly zero references to effort. Nice strawman. Yes, I’m sure some fonts take decades of hard, grueling effort to make. Just like I’m sure the nine-year-old’s green Sonic took him a lot of effort too. And no, I’m not implicitly saying it’s about talent either, before you accuse me of that.
Letters belong to humanity. Licensing your version of them because it is “unique” is bullshit because everyone’s writing is unique. Gatekeeping text presentation for money is so dystopic I have a hard time understanding how you support it, though I do admit your arguments seem to make a lot of sense if we ignore the fact that we’re basically discussing a copyright on how to write.
Ah, so you’re just saying words recreationally. There’s glory for you. What does art have to do with effort, or talent?
Fonts are protected works and you seem to understand why - but dismissively pretend an artsy font would be exceptional and distinct, instead of being as protected as any other illustration of the alphabet. None of them somehow own… the alphabet. Just the illustrations. Like any illustration. Even little Billy’s shitty Sonic OC has some copyright protections. He can’t slap his drawing of Blonic into a video game, but neither can Sega.
Consider Futura.
You have seen this font a million times and probably thought about it precisely never. It’s aggressively plain. But its development is a microcosm of early 20th-century art history, philosophy, and politics, to the point it was treated as degenerate by the actual goddamn Nazis, and then later adopted by them anyway. These boring-ass letters were innovative. This one sans-serif font has a five thousand word Wikipedia article. That’s not a complicated joke, and it’s only partially ingroup fart-sniffing. This is an element of culture you interact with every goddamn day. You’re doing it right now. Immense work has gone into designing and rendering whichever generic sans-serif you’re reading this in.
Yet even if it was still mono-spaced Codepage 437 in green on black, somebody had to draw all those pixels. Somebody decided it needed not one but two smiley faces. And it’s protected to the same extent as the BIOS code, one ROM chip over, for all the same reasons. It is an artifact of human labor, under practical constraints, for specific expressive purposes. It can’t not be.
I’ve done some Game Boy games. One has a custom font. I just winged it. It’s not important. But why would you expect those graphics to be any less protected than all the other sprites I drew?
You know what? You are right. That Wikipedia article was a fascinating read. I recant my previous statements uniquivocally, sincerely and unironically.
Thank you for the humbling lesson on what it’s like to be on the left side of the Dunning-Krueger curve. I’m an ignorant fuck.
This is not what I expected when I clicked “show more replies.”
Respect. You certainly don’t see this everyday.
I very much don’t want some corporation to be able to just take a 9 year old’s drawing and slap it on their game because someone thought it wasn’t artsy enough to be awarded protection.
I very much don’t want some corporation to be able to just take a 9 year old’s drawing and slap it on their game because someone thought it wasn’t artsy enough to be awarded protection.
Yours is a completely fair statement to which I have no objections.
And each dev is free to make their own font. But if they want to uses someone else’s, it stands to reason they might have to pay that someone else.
If you draw a really cool painting. That doesn’t mean I’m allowed to then just scan your artwork, print it on bottles and sell them.
The problem here is no one had the foresight to realise it’s a pretty big issue when you’re leasing the rights to a specific font for a specific period of time, what happens after the lease expires?
If they did, the contractual language would be different.
It’s not a problem in this sector alone. It’s a problem, in many sectors, but no one seems to learn from others mistakes.
Font and alphabet are not the same thing.
Obviously nobody can or should own the letter E, but you pretend that the font creator’s work adds nothing to that.
Someone had to do the work to make it look nice, beyond just being an E.
That is artwork inspired by the letter “E”, representing the letter E plus additional elements. It’s not correct to say that it is the letter E.
Now open a word processor, choose a font, hold your Shift key and tap the E key. What you’ll see on your screen is not “inspired by” the letter E nor does it represent the letter E. It IS the letter E. Therein lies the difference.
I chose a very extreme example, but it’s still just a stylized E, used for text. My word processor also has lots of different E’s to choose from, all stylized differently.
nor does it represent the letter E. It IS the letter E.
I have E’s that have serifs. The concept of letter E doesn’t say anything about that, but some fonts have them and others don’t.
Where do you draw the line? Serifs? Embossing? Floral motifs?
I designed a stylized E. Which side of the line does it belong?
Just because a category is fuzzy doesn’t make it invalid. That’s whynwe have laws to force standardized definitions of various concepts. You arguing against whatever definition I proposed would indict only that definition, and not the broader concept that there is an important line to begin with.
So, as far as I can tell, your arguments are that that a normal font is nothing more than the alphabet, therefore there’s no art in it, and therefore the creator shouldn’t have any claim to it.
My argument is that every detail is an artistic choice, and that simply making it look aesthetically pleasing or distinctive is art. If fonts weren’t art, why would people even bother with different looking fonts?
But regardless of the art question, if the creator can’t license their fonts, it would mean that they get no compensation for when some company uses their work.
You understood my arguments correctly. But I have since had my mind changed by mindbleach@sh.itjust.works so please forgive my ignorance.
Seriously. I would work very hard on my own font before I would pay to license one.
I wonder if it’s easier now than it was when I was in highschool. 🤔 I remember wanting to make my own “hand written” font after getting a scanner for the first time and it was an ordeal.
How many characters would you have to produce for Japanese?
Unicode has over 100,000 kanji, though the vast majority of these are esoteric kanji that are rarely used. You could trim it down to just the Joyo kanji list, consisting of 2,136 characters for everyday use.
Fuck it, write everything in hiragana and katakana.
Text that’s written in kana-only can actually be kinda difficult to read. Japanese is written without spaces between words, so kanji helps to distinguish where words actually begin and end. The language is also full of homophones, words that are pronounced the same but are written with different kanji to disambiguate them.
Realistically if a game company made their own font, they’d probably do that and then have to go through and piecemeal add more kanji that they used. Or just use hiragana/katakana for those words I guess.
Owning literal letters has got to be the dumbest shit I’ve heard in my life. Fucking leeches.
They own a font, which is a way of writing the letters. Wondering though, how many Japanese fonts are there?
I remember back during the NFT hype cycle how people were claiming they’d patented particular shades of color and were selling rights to them on the blockchain.
I gotta wonder who even enforces this shit. Where do you go to register a font-type you claim you own that looks shockingly similar to a font people have been using since the printing press was invented? So much of this just feels like vexatious litigation. “Ah, yes, that’s actually my ‘a’ and you need to pay me $20k to use it”.
It really is fucking obnoxious. I do understand in some instances where there’s some really cool font an ARTIST made but this obviously not the case. Just some snivelling pencil pushers that found a way to game the system and fuck people over.
They don’t own “literal letters.”
They just own the token which represents the ownership of the literal letters.
oh fuck kill me the day we’re gonna have to buy letter nfts instead of fonts
Then use a free OFL-licensed font. Or cooperate to commission your own fonts to share among this consortium.
Really a non-issue if you’re not stupid.
So design a couple fonts. It ain’t rocket science.
Japanese fonts are much harder to make than English fonts. Thousands of characters and all that.
Admittedly I’m not sure if it works for Japanese, but English has online tools you can use to print out a sheet to write out every character and scan to turn into a font file. Would be surprising if it didn’t exist for Japanese.
So ultimately you probably just need someone with neat handwriting.
Someone with neat handwriting, a few hours to burn, and lots of patience
Modern fonts have extra stuff to make rendering better.
Like hinting, which changes subpixel representations.Without those, you wouldn’t like the look of something like a character with a height of 10px on a 1080p display and would have to use way higher DPI stuff, with characters taking more pixels.
Won’t be unusable though. Automatically done anti-aliasing tends to be good enough too.
Kanji has over two thousand typical characters. Feel free to contribute several to open-source fonts.
Legitimate use of LLM?
Totally
“Given these hundred fonts, create a new font like them”
Voila!
Elsewhere in these comments, someone did suggest generative AI, and frankly, yeah. Using a program to apply a particular art style to a zillion glyphs would be down right commendable, prior to ChatGPT.
I don’t think that a single product whose price has multiplied by 50 times at once has ever been successful. Shit, even small price increases on streaming services over time cause people to resort to privacy (as we all should). 50 times at once is fucking insane. I don’t think that any reasonable developer will actually be buying this shit, because there’s always better alternatives available. This is fucking stupid.
Its more likely they increased the price and immediately starting shaking down anyone who was paying for the old license price. Its a frustrating scummy tech company “strategy” that unfortunately works because someone at a developer or publisher will be willing to pay the hike if it means avoiding any legal battle.
Man, shit is so fucked up. I wonder how bad things in general will have to be until something might get done about it.
Insulin in the US?
Unfortunately, people need that to live.
The thing is, they only need to successfully extort 3% of the font users to make a profit that way. And especially in text heavy games, it’s not easy to just quickly switch out a font without formatting/visual issues
Lol font licensing, I will now copyright the letter “E” in all its forms.
Can’t they just switch to something else?
I’m sure they will over time, but I would guess there’s a surprising number of potential issues with any font variance. That’s the kind of thing that can appear hardware-dependently, like certain high/low-res monitors showing fonts too big, too small, or even not at all. So any bug fixes that have come through on the subject will rely on user bug reports.
If it was as simple as the font swapping feature seen in Word, I’m sure it wouldn’t be a big deal.
Warn people the update changes fonts then, it’s not like you have to force everyone to update immediately
deleted by creator
