Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives

Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.

Monotype may as well be the mafia. My wife's work had to deal with those assholes, too, after they bought the rights to some font. They're just shaking companies down for cash.

It’s also worth noting that in the case of games in Japanese, it’s not so easy for developers to find alternatives. While games using English can rely on system UI fonts, cheap commercial fonts or open-source options, the sheer number of characters used in Japanese means high-quality fonts are extremely difficult and expensive to make, so few affordable alternatives are available.

There's already a decent selection of high quality, freely available Japanese fonts here: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan

The worst rent seekers come for everything

Owning literal letters has got to be the dumbest shit I've heard in my life. Fucking leeches.

"Font" and "licensing" are not words that belong together.

"Oh, I took the alphabet and made it slightly different - you know, like every single person who ever learned how to write - only I did it on a computer so now you have to pay me forever if you want your computer to write like mine does".

Then use a free OFL-licensed font. Or cooperate to commission your own fonts to share among this consortium.

Really a non-issue if you're not stupid.

So design a couple fonts. It ain't rocket science.

I don't think that a single product whose price has multiplied by 50 times at once has ever been successful. Shit, even small price increases on streaming services over time cause people to resort to privacy (as we all should). 50 times at once is fucking insane. I don't think that any reasonable developer will actually be buying this shit, because there's always better alternatives available. This is fucking stupid.