this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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"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".
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.
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".
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.
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.
I'll agree it's art but this take is so asinine.
If you don't think code is art, we are about to have a screaming row.
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.
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?
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.
This is not what I expected when I clicked "show more replies."
Sorry to disappoint lol.
It's bad enough I acted like a fool without persisting in my folly through pride after realizing it.
Respect. You certainly don't see this everyday.
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.
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.
Font and alphabet are not the same thing.
Obviously nobody can or should own the letter E, but you pretend that the font creator's work adds nothing to that.
Someone had to do the work to make it look nice, beyond just being an E.
That is artwork inspired by the letter "E", representing the letter E plus additional elements. It's not correct to say that it is the letter E.
Now open a word processor, choose a font, hold your Shift key and tap the E key. What you'll see on your screen is not "inspired by" the letter E nor does it represent the letter E. It IS the letter E. Therein lies the difference.
I chose a very extreme example, but it's still just a stylized E, used for text. My word processor also has lots of different E's to choose from, all stylized differently.
I have E's that have serifs. The concept of letter E doesn't say anything about that, but some fonts have them and others don't.
Where do you draw the line? Serifs? Embossing? Floral motifs?
I designed a stylized E. Which side of the line does it belong?
Actually, you could totally have demand for that font set.
Just because a category is fuzzy doesn't make it invalid. That's whynwe have laws to force standardized definitions of various concepts. You arguing against whatever definition I proposed would indict only that definition, and not the broader concept that there is an important line to begin with.
So, as far as I can tell, your arguments are that that a normal font is nothing more than the alphabet, therefore there's no art in it, and therefore the creator shouldn't have any claim to it.
My argument is that every detail is an artistic choice, and that simply making it look aesthetically pleasing or distinctive is art. If fonts weren't art, why would people even bother with different looking fonts?
But regardless of the art question, if the creator can't license their fonts, it would mean that they get no compensation for when some company uses their work.
You understood my arguments correctly. But I have since had my mind changed by mindbleach@sh.itjust.works so please forgive my ignorance.
Seriously. I would work very hard on my own font before I would pay to license one.
I wonder if it's easier now than it was when I was in highschool. 🤔 I remember wanting to make my own "hand written" font after getting a scanner for the first time and it was an ordeal.
How many characters would you have to produce for Japanese?
Unicode has over 100,000 kanji, though the vast majority of these are esoteric kanji that are rarely used. You could trim it down to just the Joyo kanji list, consisting of 2,136 characters for everyday use.
Fuck it, write everything in hiragana and katakana.
Text that's written in kana-only can actually be kinda difficult to read. Japanese is written without spaces between words, so kanji helps to distinguish where words actually begin and end. The language is also full of homophones, words that are pronounced the same but are written with different kanji to disambiguate them.
Realistically if a game company made their own font, they'd probably do that and then have to go through and piecemeal add more kanji that they used. Or just use hiragana/katakana for those words I guess.