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Japanese game developers face ridiculously high font license fees following US acquisition of major domestic provider. Live-service games to take the biggest blow (automaton-media.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 37 points 9 months ago (13 children)

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.

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  • [+] -11 points 9 months ago (12 children)

    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".

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  • [–] 25 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [+] -10 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago* (4 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 21 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    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.

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