So design a couple fonts. It ain’t rocket science.
Kanji has over two thousand typical characters. Feel free to contribute several to open-source fonts.
Japanese fonts are much harder to make than English fonts. Thousands of characters and all that.
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.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.
Excellent time for the Japanese to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language.
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that’s literally one of the most bigoted comments I’ve ever seen in the fediverse
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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
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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.”
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.
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?
Actually, you could totally have demand for that font set.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lol font licensing, I will now copyright the letter “E” in all its forms.
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.
Not a fan of generative works, but this seems like a clear place to use it to fuck shit up.
Nih.hira.term.aigen.ttf Nih.katak.term.aigen.ttf Nih.kanji1.term.aigen.ttf Nih.kanji2.term.aigen.ttf Etc
Not the fault of the prompter if the resulting fonts appear to resemble licensed fonts, which are often slightly different copies of each other anyway.
Generative works cannot be copyrighted, so it would forever be in the public domain.
The only drawback would be that you would have to announce that you used slop in your game.
So the bar has shifted from “it’s okay to replace dish-washers and others such staff with robots, as long as artist jobs are protected” to “well, okay, you can replace certain kinds of artist with robots.”
Which kind of artist is next in line?
I will gladly replace dishwashers with dishwashing machines if they are energy, water, and cost-efficient, but I don’t believe we are discussing artisan dishwashing. This borderline association approaches sophistry, so I think it is much better to discuss the use of art and the corporate hoarding of artwork.
Monotype does seem to pay font creators well for royalties.. My frustration is the aggressive pricing models, the growth of monotype to where they own the whole market (per tfa), and the way they are demanding payment for fonts without checking to see if there is an existing license..
Basically, I will encourage and pay for fair business practices. Squeezing people for cash pisses me off. I’m not knowledgeable enough to pretend to create a free font set in this manner, but I would advocate creating tools that would fuck up the market. Open fonts would be great, but again tfa says that it’s too complicated of a data set for that, and the market is too small for independent artists.
Lastly, my answer wasn’t a valid solution. There are plenty of legal and social hurdles to it.
I mean, it’s not the fault of the artists, and I don’t really think this is meant to hurt them at all. They wanted to pay for the work of artists, but I also think it’s unreasonable to expect game studios to spend 50 times more than they were before, for, forgive me if I’m wrong, a worse product. Ai is obviously not preferable, and it’s not what I’d choose in this scenario, but it’s also better than feeding Monotype’s greed.
Right, it’s okay if you’re saving a lot of money in the process.
Sorry, you think that they’re suddenly going to be paying artists 50 times more as well? No, their pay is probably going to stay right where it is. Monotype executives however, are probably going to be expecting some nice bonuses. This is all assuming that Monotype pays the font artists based on how much their font sells, and not a flat rate to simply create one as a contractor of some kind. I wouldn’t know, I know very little about fonts and Monotype. Best thing that studios could do is probably commission their own font artists for a more reasonable amount to create a font for them. I guess that also depends on how much time and effort it takes artists to create a font, and how much they charge. Depending on the price, that may also be difficult to do for a smaller studio. This could all have been prevented if writing kanji in slightly different ways wasn’t something that could be copyrighted, or if Monotype hadn’t raised prices so much.
Sorry, you think that they’re suddenly going to be paying artists 50 times more as well?
You’ve already established that it’s okay to switch to AI to save money, we’re now just dickering about the specific price. You were the one who introduced the 50-times threshold, I’m not concerned about being so specific.
I guess that also depends on how much time and effort it takes artists to create a font, and how much they charge. Depending on the price, that may also be difficult to do for a smaller studio.
Indeed, AI tends to be more economically beneficial for smaller studios. It’s one of the things I like about it.
I don’t think it’s okay, but I also won’t judge people with limited resources for using it for things that they realistically can’t afford. I believe that humans should design every single aspect of any video game. Monotype has made that substantially more difficult. So, I won’t judge a studio with limited resources if they use ai for this singular aspect of their otherwise completely human creation nearly as much as I would, say, Rockstar or EA or Activision. But there’s also plenty of other ways to get a font, several people here have linked free options.
Generative works cannot be copyrighted
While that is generally true, a derivative work of a copyrighted work is usually copyrighted by the original author (see remixes of music where the remixer only partially owns a copyright for the remix but the original artist does as well). That is what makes generative AI so risky. A court could order “This is a automated modification of work XY, thereby the full copyright lies with the author of work XY.”
I was considering how copyrighted material can still be generated after writing that, so fair. If you fed in work a and made the same modification to each piece then it would just be a modified work a and not actually new work b.
Free fonts exist, so you don’t even need to resort to AI.
I hear you, and that was my first thought reading through the article.
According to TFA:
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. This is what made LETS an important service, but its revamped pricing and limitations have now put it beyond the reach of a good chunk of developers.
Maybe there are alternatives out there, and I think a crowd sourced open font would be a great idea. I personally have no idea how to go about organizing a project of that scope.
Also, tbf, my answer was more emotional bitching than a serious take.
Calling every use slop is like calling all e-mail spam.
