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Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k (gamesindustry.biz)
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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.
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Why did they rent the fonts instead of buying in the first place?
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Why would a company pay for fonts?
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: 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.
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Genshin's UI font is produced by Hanyi, not Monotype. https://www.hanyi.com.cn/adminlte/ueditor/image/20230906/1693979942910561.png
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.
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> 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. [0] - https://cn.monotype-asia.com/contact-us [1] - https://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/tencent-expands-global-presence [2] - https://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/alibaba-group%CA%BCs-new-typeface
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.
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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
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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: https://fonts.google.com/noto I am not sure if it's possible to parameterize it to have the look that game developers wanted.
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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.
Additional anecdote about Monotype pricing policies: https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1jqqlm6/monotype_just_hit_us_with_a_30000yr_font_license/
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And after digging through the comments... Yup it's private equity again. PE buyouts should be considered criminal fraud.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Kohler Can Access Pictures from "End-to-End Encrypted" Toilet Camera (varlogsimon.leaflet.pub)
Imagine the collective brainpower that could be used to help solve the world's ills, and instead decided, no, what we need is a camera pointed at your asshole which we feed into an AI-powered SaaS we can then sell to you for a subscription. This industry is finished.
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It’s pretty impressive that that juicero thing wasn’t the most bizarre thing they could come up with.
> It was only a decade or so ago that "End-To-End Encryption" began to mean something other than "encrypted in transit". No, before that it was simply not a term, except in some obscure radio protocol (and even there someone competent in cryptography would probably not have chosen that term) > E2EE now means something wildly different in the context of messaging applications and the like (since like 2014) so this is more of an outdated way of saying "no one is getting your poop pictures between your toilet and us". The outdated way was saying "Military-grade 128-bit encryption", no one really used the E2EE term before it got the current meaning > I wonder if they encrypt it and then send it over TLS or if they're just relying on TLS as the client->server encryption. Restated, I wonder how deep in their stack the encrypted blob goes before it's decrypted. Some homemade encryption added on top of TLS is very unlikely to increase the security of the system
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> No, before that it was simply not a term, except in some obscure radio protocol > no one really used the E2EE term before it got the current meaning It most certainly was a term and no it wasn't simply limited to "some obscure radio protocol". 1994: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/363791 1984: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/357401.357402 1978: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA059221.pdf > Some homemade encryption added on top of TLS is very unlikely to increase the security of the system "Some homemade encryption" is not what I was suggesting at all. E.g. encrypted-at-the-source (client side) AWS files are still sent over TLS as an encrypted blob within an encrypted blob but remain encrypted past the TLS boundary.
The modern usage of E2EE definitely means that "the server cannot access it". That's the meat of this entire discussion. While you are technically correct in a network topology sense (where the "ends" are the TCP connection points), that definition has been obsolete in consumer privacy contexts for a decade now due to "true" E2EE encryption. If we use your definition, then Gmail, Facebook, and Amazon are all "End-to-End Encrypted" because the traffic is encrypted between my client and their server. But we don't call them E2EE because the service provider holds the keys and can see the data. In 2025, when a company claims a camera product is "E2EE", a consumer interprets that to mean "Zero Knowledge". I.e. the provider cannot see the video feeds. If Kohler holds the keys to analyze the data, that is Encryption in Transit, not E2EE. Even though in an older sense (which is what my original comment was saying), it was "End to End Encrypted" because the two ends were defined as Client and Server and not Client to Client (e.g. FB Messenger User1 and FB Messenger User2).
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> If we use your definition, then Gmail, Facebook, and Amazon are all "End-to-End Encrypted" because the traffic is encrypted between my client and their server. That may or may not be the case. TLS is always terminated at a load balancer that uses TLS but it's still common to use HTTP within datacenters. So it may not be E2EE and it's a meaningful security feature.
I wasn't a network engineer, but to my recollection "end-to-end encryption" was only used occasionally, probably by people not too knowledgeable in cryptography
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Well respectfully your recollection is missing lots of references by people that were "knowledgeable in cryptography". You can easily find these references in the literature, often comparing link encryption with end-to-end encryption. Some of the earliest papers outlining the plans for SSL in the 90s (Analysis of the SSL 3.0 Protocol) are based on this exact foundation from the 80s (End-To-End Arguments in System Design). Hell, you can even go back to 1978 and see MITRE discussing this exact thing in "Limitations of end-to-end encryption in secure computer networks".
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