Chebucto Regional Softball Club

If you don't think code is art, we are about to have a screaming row.

Ban the entire business model.

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.

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.](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12/12-h/12-h.htm#%3A%7E%3Atext=When I use a word) 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.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface)) 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.

*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.

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](https://sh.itjust.works/comment/11273823) and [over](https://sh.itjust.works/post/21848271/12561312) and [over](https://sh.itjust.works/post/27285305/14714870) and [over](https://sh.itjust.works/post/32680183/16663477), 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.

'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.

If Valve bumped their cut from 30% to 40%, do you imagine publishers would rush to EGS? Epic's cut is already 15 points lower than Valve's. It hasn't moved the needle. Valve kills studios by saying 'no thank you.' They have immense power. They just don't use it in any way that freaks people out. The mere possibility shapes the entire industry. Only niche studios try weird shit, because large studios don't risk poking the bear. Games want to feature nudity and intimacy, but most are so self-censored, they could be *televised.* The cultural prevalence of nude mods is proof of demand that has been frustrated. If you'd rather blame Mastercard and Visa openly dictating what art can and can't be sold, by all means, we can talk about their joint control of online payment. But it might get blunt if you insist one store taking Bitcoin means that's not a duopoly.

Apparently there is. But you can't access enough of it unless you're on the one store that really counts. If only there were words for one company arbitrarily restricting who gets to reach customers.

> If Steam not hosting your game causes your studio to shut down, it’s not because Steam is being some unreasonable gatekeeper. It’s because you’re making something that there isn’t any market for, or so little of a market that your only hope is to get it visible to as many people as possible so the tiny fraction of them that are interested can keep you afloat. You *know* being on Steam means crucial access to more customers. To most customers, in fact. The games that do well, despite being invisible to the supermajority of customers, are the exceptions. Nobody gets dropped from EGS or Itch and goes "oh no, we're ruined, we're only on Steam now." But the opposite happens repeatedly. The reason is not complicated.

*Ability.* Not a history of doing anticompetitive behavior, just the *ability* to do it. Monopoly is a precondition to that abuse. From the same page: "Obtaining a monopoly by superior products, innovation, or business acumen is legal; however, the same result achieved by exclusionary or predatory acts may raise antitrust concerns." "Finally, the monopolist may have a legitimate business justification for behaving in a way that prevents other firms from succeeding in the marketplace. For instance, the monopolist may be competing on the merits in a way that benefits consumers through greater efficiency or a unique set of products or services." Is it a fnord? Is there some other word you would understand to mean, there's only one big-ass store people treat as the default, and if they start being dicks, we're all in deep shit?