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Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
- deadbabe 11mo agoWhat 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?
- weikju 11mo agoA few hours ago, [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127400
- internetter 11mo ago> 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.
- halapro 11mo agoHave 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.
- venturecruelty 11mo agoWhat a bereft way to produce beauty. "This grey slop is good enough, isn't it?" Christ, people, let's be human again.
- halapro 11mo agoMy man, that battle is lost.
- venturecruelty 11mo agoOnly if you give up.
- boxedemp 11mo agoThe 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.
- halapro 11mo agoFonts are not generated as bitmaps, anyone who doesn't see how AI can and will be good at font generation is a fool. It wasn't long ago that we thought creativity and programming were safe from AI. Fonts are entirely within the realm of possibilities within 12 months.
- rdsubhas 11mo agoAsk the models to create vector SVGs and you'll understand how far off they are on shapes.
- deadbabe 11mo agoI find that a “good” font is just whatever aesthetic people find popular, regardless of legibility.
- colechristensen 11mo agoAs 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.
- rpearl 11mo agoperhaps when the clocks at https://clocks.brianmoore.com/ 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.
- conception 11mo agoWow, 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.
- oefrha 11mo agoSounds 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 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.
- rpearl 11mo agoI do not know the market well; very interesting, thank you.
- jack1243star 11mo agoThose 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.
- oefrha 11mo agoThose fonts are completely indistinguishable from the average cartoon/artistic font from the 2000s which are definitely not created by AI. I don’t like most of them, but I don’t like most of the human-designed ones either. Plus AI-assisted fonts in CJK often means hand drawing a couple hundred characters, maybe more, then generating the thousands of remaining characters (I assume the current crop of SOTA models could change that, but these fonts have been going around for a while), so the odds are what you see in the samples are mainly or maybe even completely human-generated.
- vunderba 11mo agoPerhaps 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.
- raincole 11mo agoAI 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.
- cyberrock 11mo agoCreating 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_140#Variant_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_140#Variant_forms
- Aachen 11mo agoAre 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
- Aeolun 11mo agoThere’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.
- martijnvds 11mo agoMinecraft ships it I think?
- Aachen 11mo agoMinecraft as an example of desirable graphic properties :D It sure has its style and I stand by what I've always maintained about gameplay being infinitely more important than polished graphics, but that does sound ironic to my ears!
- lunar_rover 11mo agoEven in Minecraft it looks bad. Some CJK characters are Serif for some reason.
- teraflop 11mo agoWhen 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.
- Shank 11mo agoThe 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.
- kmeisthax 11mo agoThere 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...
- expedition32 11mo agoCompanies that think they can just copy paste what works into another country usually fail.
- crooked-v 11mo agoThe 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: 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). 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.
- yborg 11mo agoGenshin 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.
- alephnerd 11mo ago> 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 https://cn.monotype-asia.com/contact-us [1] - https://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/tencent-expands-global-presence https://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/tencent-expa... [2] - https://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/alibaba-group%CA%BCs-new-typeface https://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/alibaba-grou... [3] - https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/zhengceku/202507/content_7032625.htm https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/zhengceku/202507/content_7032625....
- ThrowawayTestr 11mo agoThat's a bit of a jump isn't it?
- lurk2 11mo agoWhy would a company pay for fonts?
- sparqlittlestar 11mo ago1. 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
- Towaway69 11mo ago[flagged]
- zerr 11mo agoWhy did they rent the fonts instead of buying in the first place?
- linuxhansl 11mo agoSo 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.
- tippa123 11mo agoAm 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.
- _f9cu 11mo agoWhy is font a challenge?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- p0w3n3d 11mo agoThis 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
- otikik 11mo agoI 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.
- gjadi 11mo agoMaybe not for the full japanese characters set, but for an existing game, they could do it for the subset of characters they are using.
- llama_drama 11mo agoI don't think that's practical, because the subset would still be quite large. I did a quick analysis of the Factorio localiization files and found more than 1200 unique characters
- HPsquared 11mo agoThis does sound like a perfect use case for "AI" tools however. It's literally style transfer. Edit: though maybe grounds for a "rounded corners" style lawsuit, given the business style of the folk we are dealing with here.
- mattkevan 11mo agoAh 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.
- mchusma 11mo agoGoogle fonts has about 2000 fonts with about 8000 total variations I believe. I pretty much refuse to believe that you can’t find the font you want there. Finding it is the hard part. I saw multiple font discussions today. These are just variations on letters, there was some interesting stuff in the past but it’s over now. There should be no ip left, just remove all protections. The world won’t be worse off.
- michaelt 11mo agoWhen I select 'Japanese' on fonts.google.com the number of fonts drops from 1901 families down to 50. Selecting 'Hiragana and Katakana' raises the number to 81. That's still a lot of fonts, but it's not 2000. I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.
- Sardtok 11mo agoI suppose you're counting the joyo kanji plus kana alphabets with diacritics. But the actual count of kanji is much higher, even if Japanese uses a relatively small number of characters for day-to-day writing. Pretty much every native university student I met when I studied there, had passed the Kanji Kentei level 1 test. A certification of proficiency in around 6000 kanji.
- decimalenough 11mo agoYeah nah imma call bullshit on that. Kentei 1 is notoriously difficult, only a few thousand people per year try it and the pass rate is single digits.
- seeknotfind 11mo agoI'm looking forward to seeing everyone coming up together, creating better fonts for free, and wiping out any of those profits. Is Monotype trying to destroy their own industry, or do they really think this will work?
- proc0 11mo agoI never thought about this but JP fonts probably need thousands of glyphs? Creating new fonts must be brutal.
- viraptor 11mo agoCreating new (really good looking) fonts must be brutal Many symbols are collections of other symbols raised and placed more or less on a grid. You could cover quite a lot with not that many created glyphs. Now, actually making it good quality and properly adjusted... that could take years...
- jonplackett 11mo agoFonts are an absolute joke. Foundries must be run by the mafia at this point.
- tonyhart7 11mo agothat fucking robbery
- dryark 11mo agoThe Monotype pricing change is brutal, but there’s a workaround. Derive new Japanese font families directly from public-domain sources. I’ve been working on doing exactly that. Reconstructing clean vector glyphs from old metal-type Japanese books. The quality of those prints is surprisingly high, and they include thousands of kanji in consistent style. With some new technological innovations and a reasonable amount of hard work, you can produce a completely new, fully legal font family without touching any commercial IP. The method I've devised is proprietary, but I’ll say this: it’s absolutely possible, and the output rivals modern JP fonts. Given the sudden jump from ~$300/year to ~$20k/year for some devs, I expect more people to go down the “rebuild from PD artifacts” route instead of staying locked to a monopoly.
- oliwarner 11mo agoIndeed. Scan a book in public domain, feed into an online font generation service, pay somebody to clean it up. A few hours later, you have a font you can use how you like. Is it as good? Probably not, but it's much cheaper. Edit: oh look https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127400
- dryark 11mo agoYes. I did see that other article. No the process we are using is not using AI. We are not using OCR either. We are using computational geometry and forensics methodology. No flatbed scanners. No sheet fed scanners. This isn't like anything ever done before. It's entirely different and higher quality than any result you can get through AI or OCR. I do agree that detailed work is required to do it correctly and produced high quality results. I'm not offhandedly saying "just do these simple things and bam perfection."
- flutteringfool 11mo agoWow that sounds incredible. I'm super into fonts, I understand the proprietary nature but if OCR isn't used and neither is flatbed scanning, does that mean the 3D model is obtained? I can't think of another method. It's very cool, would love to see some fonts you have available whenever it's out!
- account42 11mo agoOh no, live service game companies have encountered another predator. How sad.
- chmod775 11mo agoNever, ever buy this kind of stuff on a subscription. As a business you're often even easier to shake down than a consumer.
- devnull3 11mo agoWith all the advancement in AI, shouldn't it be easier to create new fonts?
- Minor49er 11mo agoWhat a bold suggestion (pun intended). Wouldn't this draw the ire of the people who are up in arms about AI art supposedly stealing from artists?
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- vitorsr 11mo agoMonotype does not have the same consolidation with CJK when compared to the virtual monopoly it has with Latin script typefaces. They still have a healthy selection of competitive companies to choose from such as Morisawa, Iwata, Motoya, Ricoh, JIYUKOBO, DynaComware, Arphic, Sandoll...