Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
22 comments
·December 3, 2025Aachen
cyphar
[delayed]
teraflop
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.
jjmarr
Part of the reason Arial is so dominant is because it's proportioned the same as Helvetica, meaning it can be swapped in to avoid licensing fees without affecting document layout.
conradev
Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging#Consolidation...
Fontworks’ team, type inventory, IP, technology, and services will join global type specialist Monotype–Monotype’s first acquisition in Japan.
michaelbuck
Additional anecdote about Monotype pricing policies:
https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1jqqlm6/mon...
omoikane
I know Noto Sans can render just about everything, and has a permissive license:
I am not sure if it's possible to parameterize it to have the look that game developers wanted.
Aeolun
There’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.
Shank
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.
crooked-v
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.
The fonts affected include ones like the main font used by the game Genshin Impact, which has 2.8 million daily users.
yborg
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.
deadbabe
What 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?
raincole
AI 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.
internetter
> 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
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.
vunderba
Perhaps 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.
rpearl
perhaps when the clocks at 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.
oefrha
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).
rpearl
I do not know the market well; very interesting, thank you.
conception
Wow, 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.
weikju
A few hours ago, [0]
colechristensen
As 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.
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