[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127400

Probably because you're wrong. Anybody can make a font, making a good font is a highly under appreciated art form.

Even then, I wouldn't want it making a kanji font. Consider 感 and 惑, both of which would be taught before high school.

It would be pretty easy to make a font generator using LLMs and visual models.

The price rising and licensing issue will only do one thing: pushing people to AI. Perhaps they see it as inevitable so they're trying to milk the last batch of customers though.

If you've picked a typeface, and designed other UI elements that look good in conjunction with it, but suddenly that typeface becomes unaffordable, then you have to do some work to find an alternative that's still acceptable.

In particular, game UI tends to be designed around the particular dimensions (metrics) of a font's characters. So a string of text whose size is "just right" in one font might look too big or too small in another, even at the same nominal font size. And this can affect many different pieces of text throughout a game.

  Fontworks’ team, type inventory, IP, technology, and services will join global type specialist Monotype–Monotype’s first acquisition in Japan.

https://fonts.google.com/noto

I am not sure if it's possible to parameterize it to have the look that game developers wanted.

But, as everyone else has mentioned, font usage in games (and most creative visual works) is more particular than just the bare minimum of "does it actually render the glyphs". Imagine if all text in your favourite game was all Times New Roman, it would make the game worse.

[1]: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan

It is that existing annually paid licences are converted. The extra work for existing titles is the problem. And:

> The crisis could even eventually force some Japanese studios to rebrand entirely if their corporate identity is tied to a commercial font they can no longer afford to license.