Evidently game devs have some distinct expectations, or they could already use those and save some money.
This could be a rallying point for professional artists to build a font family conveying whimsy, authority, fantasy, antiquity, futurism, etc. Like how DejaVu covers a little bit of everything.
Elsewhere in these comments, someone did suggest generative AI, and frankly, yeah. Using a program to apply a particular art style to a zillion glyphs would be down right commendable, prior to ChatGPT.
I have officially lost the plot on what’s happening here.
Kanji has over two thousand typical characters. Feel free to contribute several to open-source fonts.
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?
… they already have two syllabaries. They’re not about to upend their whole writing system just to maintain foreign intellectual property.
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.
We could also make the claim that every drawing is an artwork
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.
Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.
Calling every use slop is like calling all e-mail spam.
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.
Have a backup instance in mind, if the culture of your current one doesn’t work out. Especially yours. People are not at liberty to express what’s what with this instance on this instance.
Do not be afraid to block people, because they will keep showing up, and some of them are psychic vampires whom their instances will never punish. Universal Monk has a sockpuppet on every instance and will probably respond rudely to slash angrily report this comment for pointing out they’re a block-evading ‘hmm curious’ spambot.
As on reddit, beware the cult of civility. Some communities (subs) will viciously punish ‘fuck off’ but not any behavior that frankly deserves a vulgar dismissal. Read the sidebar. Don’t be afraid to search for alternative communities if the sole moderator is intolerable. See also the Ye Power Trippin Bastards community on dbzer0.
Epic… funded… the game.
Remedy took money up-front, expecting it to be more money than they would make later.
Being on Steam means access to customers, and more sales. You said so. So Epic, to promote the Epic Game Store, estimated how much revenue Alan Wake 2 would lose by not being on Steam, doubled it, and wrote that on a check.
Standard Oil never had an absolute monopoly. Look me in the eyes and tell me they don’t count.
Argumentum ad Webster is a fallacy. Words mean what they are used to mean, and what they are understood to mean. The goddang FTC has a page explaining: “Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct.” The kind of monopoly we break up still has competition. It’s only about market share and power.
When a company dominates any industry, they obviously have power that could easily be abused, even if they do not abuse it. Do you understand that the potential for abuse is a problem, even if it’s a different kind of problem than abuse occurring? You can’t prevent things by waiting until they happen.
Was that Walmart exploiting it’s market share
Yes. Obviously. It was preachy corporate censorship on a scale we hardly recognize today. One company being so big means some art doesn’t get made.
Walmart’s an excellent example for how absolute monopoly is not required. Obviously there’s other supermarkets. But some companies drop entire product lines if Walmart doesn’t pick them up. This one store represents enough of the market that any investment is immediately considered a loss. Being in or out is such a big fucking deal that products are tailored to that store, rather than to customers.
Again, what should we do about that?
Practically speaking? Nothing, because this monopoly has not abused its power. They don’t seem likely to. And yet: it’s still there. Things change. Shit happens. If Gabe’s yacht sinks and Larry Ellison buys the company, maybe everyone decides EGS ain’t so bad, but there’s a world of lesser horrors that wouldn’t spook the herd.
Worth stating, Australia’s censorship didn’t phase him… but Valve’s would have.
Australia is a significant but minor market. Steam is ‘be on this service or fail.’
An anime called Chargeman Ken where “animation” is a generous compliment. Some action shots are three frames long. Most shots are static - with one alternating mouth motion, when characters aren’t just framed, positioned, or turned to avoid animating them at all. But it works. You are watching a clear story take place. It’s not a radio drama or narration. The story is terrible, because these broke fools were animating every first draft that could fill twenty minutes, but events occur onscreen in a sequence that you can follow with your eyeballs.
And the result is some dramatic presentation. One episode starts with characters watching a Godzilla knockoff. Buildings take time to draw, so you get two frames of an upward angle conveying Cheapogodzilla’s size. When the hero bursts into a room for an accusation, they’re framed at a distance, to avoid animating their face. The show is rife with all this dynamic perspective and foreshortening that even cheap CGI today won’t do, because they think they have to fill the entire frame with someone’s head. Cartoons with budgets get flat presentation because they’re trying to be sitcoms and clearly show off nuance and subtlety. Making absolute garbage for a fraction of the price takes so much more creativity.
Here’s the funny part: it’s probably fine. AND YET, people will twist themselves inside-out to deny the premise.
Your root post fully admitted the accusation:
If you’re not in this one store, you lose access to most customers.
That’s a fucking monopoly.
As I’ve explained to people, over and over and over and over, anti-competitive practice is a separate thing. Monopoly just means market share. It’s enough power to become a problem. It is the ability to fuck people over. We need to recognize these situations, before they ruin everything.
For comparison, Netflix was a monopoly, and I think the entire world would be happier if that was still the case. But saying so doesn’t mean they weren’t a monopoly. For a good while there, your choices for legal streaming video were Netflix, or lying to yourself about legality. The desirable solution would be multiple services offering all the same shows for competitive… not the exclusivity hellscape we got. And gaming would be better-off if every game was in every storefront, like boxes on shelves, instead of one store being a huge fucking deal and the rest being nearly irrelevant.
‘But if not being on Steam means they can’t get enough money, how would more money help?’
You cannot be serious.
why would any studio choose not to release on Steam?
Epic gave Remedy a shitload of money, up-front. All exclusivity these days works like that. Nobody wants to reach fewer customers. Some of them are convinced to - some of them are forced to. Alan Wake exemplifies the former, and there’s a good chance Remedy regrets the decision.
One company restricting access to most customers is a different thing.
And it becomes a problem for everyone.
Ban the entire business model.