People complain about the evil of landlords, but it's nothing compared to companies like this.

Landlords at least nominally provide some sort of ongoing services. There are no necessary services a font company could possibly provide - there's no maintenance, no upkeep, no ongoing costs at all. This is just pure, and purely evil, rent-seeking.

As reported by Gamemakers and GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game licence plan at the end of November.

The expensive replacement plan – offered through Fontwork's parent company, Monotype – doesn't even provide local pricing for Japanese developers, and comes with a 25,000 user-cap, which is likely not workable for Japan's bigger studios.

The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters.

What is this even licensing? You can't copyright a typeface in Japan or the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces#Japan

Technically the .ttf file could be copyright as a specific means to reproduce the typeface, but someone could just run it through something to copy the shapes and then there's nothing to be licensed.

Notosans all the things everywhere? It’s a shame, but font users have an ethical duty to not pay these scumbags anything

Nowadays, creating fonts is easier than ever, with widely available tools. Creating good fonts that don’t look like hot garbage and don’t make your eyes hurt after reading a paragraph is somewhat harder, though type designers graduate from courses every year. There are lots of small independent foundries selling fonts around the world, and consultancies that will design fonts on commission for brands. If Monotype are going to play the private-equity extortion game, they’ll soon find game companies commissioning fonts they then own outright from designers, or even hiring a few type designers with the usual intake of 3D graphics/texture/animation artists.

So then it sounds like somebody just needs to provide a font for applications that is a low priced one time payment and they would do pretty well. I wonder how difficult it is

There are a lot of free fonts (open source in your language) out there that cost nothing to use.

Have the penalties for what you ratified for. 🎻