The problem is Japanese has so many characters - typically a font would need 5-6000 glyphs to be usably complete - that it isn't easy to create new fonts. English ASCII is 96 characters, for reference. A designer can crank out a new thematically-appropriate font in a week.

Use an open font. Problem solved. Can I please have the 380 bucks annually now?

This is what most companies seem to be aiming for these days as well, along with business-to-business sales as opposed to business-to-consumer sales. For a *long* time now, many companies have stopped trying to increase profits by increasing the customer base, but rather are *shrinking* the customer based with intent to make up the difference and then some with increased costs. I did some back of the napkin math on the price increases for Xbox Game Pass the last time around, and the numbers were basically that they could lose about a *third* of their customers for Game Pass and still break even, so as long as they lost less than a third of their customer base, they were still creating more profit than before. They would need to be pushing losing fully half of all subscribers for it to make a negative dent on their profits. This is late stage capitalism. This is rent extraction where they are *indeed* happier to make $0 because their customer base was already so vast that they can afford to have a significant portion of those customers bail and they will *still* make money.

Build an open source & paid cloud hosted service that can sync OFL licensed fonts through an API, GUI, GIT and you'll be swimming in cash. Just make sure it's easy for casuals & devs and works for both individuals and teams. There are projects similar to this, but nothing nearly this level of usable by everyone.

Yet another reason to use and support open fonts. Idk how many fonts are typically in a game but at $20k a pop, I suspect you could hire your own designer or collaborate with a few other small studios to design a few open game fonts.

The problem is Japanese has so many characters - typically a font would need 5-6000 glyphs to be usably complete - that it isn't easy to create new fonts. English ASCII is 96 characters, for reference. A designer can crank out a new thematically-appropriate font in a week.

Why the hell would anyone need to *host* free fonts? A proper OS has them in the repos. Oh right - there's still people who believe the diarrhea coming from MicroLimp is a "proper OS" especially corporate IT departments

Your post reads a bit aggresive towards a use case completely fabricated within your imagination. However, it's quite different in reality. I do graphic design and need a FOSS alternative to Fontbase, but also able to comply with technical requirements for dev teams. Something like what I've described in my OP would be great for both dev and designer teams alike. Also, if you try to be nicer to people, you'll help make the Fediverse a nicer place.

I was being aggressive, but not towards another poster, but the corporate bullshit culture that requires such a thing as an online repository for free fonts.

I think the collab would be more likely. Ideally the government would create public domain fonts for their official languages. If they publish in that language then they should support the font for that language. Funding such an endeavour as a single studio/designer would require making over 6000 characters for the font ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208 ). I'm sure modern unicode could do wonders to reduce that number (kanji has ~2,000).

Fonts cannot be easily removed or replaced. So you pay their extortion or they sue you and get it anyway. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They are the _comic villain_ kind of evil.

If you are collaborating with a team, you need to keep your work in sync. What does this have to do with corporativism?

Is it Monotype? Yes, it’s Monotype. For those who don’t know, they are an illegal international monopoly that aggressively buys up all competitors for the _purpose_ of extorting users like this. It is their entire business model and they have been allowed to get away with it for over a decade because of how well they’ve hidden themselves.

If even one company opts to keep paying the license, that makes up for over 50 cancellations. They need less than 1/50 of their current licensees to continue paying to break even. It's shitty, but it's basically a company taking themselves out of an entry-level market to extract more money from the types of clients where $20,500 is a rounding error.