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Japanese devs face font licensing dilemma as leading provider increases annual plan price from $380 to $20,000+ (www.gamesindustry.biz)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 11 points 9 months ago* (3 children)

Fonts cannot be easily removed or replaced. Sometimes for technical reasons and sometimes for branding or operational reasons. So you pay their extortion or they sue you and get it anyway. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They are the comic villain kind of evil.

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

    to be fair, anyone using a font for branding that requires an annual subscription, put themselves in that spot. I think the reasons would be technical in this case. But they're basically betting that $20k/y in a couple years couldn't pay for the efforts to replace it, and I think that's really risky.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago

    Monotype is functionally an international monopoly. More than Luxottica, but for many of the same reasons. If the small selection of open source fonts don’t do what a company needs, then their only option other than Monotype is to have a font created. Monotype owns almost everything font related. Companies, fonts, everything.

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