Video games in Japanese will soon become more expensive in their development and will likely change as well. The reason for this is a licensing change.
What is this rule? While we in the West can choose from a variety of beautiful and not so beautiful fonts, developers from other countries face greater challenges. Languages like Japanese, which use a script system of syllables and Kanji instead of letters, require a font that includes as many of the characters they want to use as possible.
Developers in Japan are also affected, who until now have relied on the affordable service “Fontworks LETS” for their games and apps. For 60,000 yen per year (approximately 330 euros), developers could use high-quality fonts.
However, the company behind the service has been acquired, and the new parent company “Monotype” has significantly increased the prices and agreements for the service. A license will now cost about 50 times as much, namely 20,500 US dollars, or about 17,600 euros. But another limit poses problems for developers.
You can see an affected title here in the trailer:
A rule that renders the service unusable
What is this limit? With the new license comes a limit that according to gamespark.jp ensures that only 25,000 users per application can see the fonts used. Unimaginable for developers who want to make their games available to millions of players simultaneously.
However, switching to another font is not easy. Developers need a similarly high-quality font that contains all the characters used in their game and also must acquire a license for that. This will likely be more expensive than the previous LETS plan, which was used as a good-and-cheap option for titles like Fate/Grand Order, downloaded over a million times.
What does this mean for the games? Anyone who enjoys titles from Japan will soon notice a change in the appearance of the characters in some games. In some cases, this can even affect fonts in German and English, if the games use the provider “Fontworks LETS”.
Affected titles that choose to change their font will not only make changes in the games but also across the entire brand, including the website, marketing materials, and social media.
While the impact on players will only mean slight visual changes, a lot of development work is required behind the scenes. All texts must be rechecked for correctness and adjusted if necessary.
For titles from Japan or with a Japanese translation, the change can therefore be expensive. But not only with fonts can small changes lead to a lot of work. Even the choice of server provider or DDoS protection provider is an important one: Our internet has a big problem that puts us all at risk of serious outages
