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 WEST
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A change in license plans has made it up to 50 times more expensive for Japanese game developers to use commercial fonts in their games and apps.
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13h

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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1012h

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.

BruisedMoose
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22h

Respect. You certainly don’t see this everyday.

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78h

This is not what I expected when I clicked “show more replies.”

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