At the end of 2025, Monotype, a global font and layout design company, was strongly opposed to the announcement that it would cease an economic, beneficial font authorization scheme in Japan. The programme is widely used in Japanese in large series and independent games, such as The Anecdotal of the Goddess, Destiny/Cortain Designation.
In September 2023, Monotype acquired the Japanese top font company, Fontworks, which was the original provider of the package. As a result of Monotype’s integration of Fontworks’ original authorization model into its global subscription system, Japanese developers face extremely high cost pressures. At that time, Monotype offered only business-oriented alternatives at an annual cost of more than $20.5 million. In comparison, only $380 was originally planned.
Faced with widespread criticism and concern from the developer community, Monotype responded at the end of last year that it would temporarily resume its original LETS subscription service until 31 March 2026. To date, Monotype has issued a new statement outlining how its game font authorization will work. Monoype states that the ETS plan has been revised to “better reflect the needs of independent developers”. The updated scheme is priced at the annual base LETS subscription fee of Yen49,500, plus the game/application integration fee of Yen33,000 (the previous fee model was Yen49500 + Yen1,000, the latter almost tripled). One improvement is that the integration of multiple games seems no longer to be restricted.
On the other hand, Monotype introduced a new distribution cap (number of copies of games that can be sold). Although Monotype stated that the cap was sufficient to meet the “typically independent game distributor size”, no specific figures were disclosed, which left Japanese developers uncertain as to what was acceptable. For projects that exceed the undisclosed maximum or are oriented towards large-scale global distribution, Monotype leads developers to choose other authorized options, such as through the application of specific authorizations for the MyFonts platform under the flag, or customised enterprise agreements, which makes medium-sized projects quite difficult.
This update appears to be the first step taken by Monotype to honour its earlier promise of “new services for the Japanese market” after the boycott last December. Although the statement indicates that Monotype will continue to improve its way of operating, many of the concerns raised in 2025, in particular with regard to price transparency and the scalability of successful business projects, still appear to have not been addressed.