On theme with my other Halloween-week post about freight shipping, I have a quick story to tell about font rights that I hope will save my fellow creators a lot of money.
Before I share these two stories and the lessons learned, I want to give credit to companies and designers who spend immense time, effort, and talent to design fonts. I think we’re so used to having a vast array of fonts to choose from in word processing programs that we don’t think about how much thought went into every pixel. On top of that, I would wager that publishers far too often misuse fonts (unintentionally or intentionally), leaving the designers without compensation.
Our graphic designer is well aware of all that–she has worked in the graphic design industry for nearly 20 years. But every end-user license agreement (EULA) is a little different, and we recently discovered (and tried to rectify) two situations where we misused fonts. I’m not going to mention which fonts they were, as I don’t want to accidentally reflect poorly on their creators.
Spooky Story #1
Literally on the same week that our graphic designer was reviewing our various font EULAs, we received an email from a font company noting that we had gone beyond the restricted nature of the free use of a particular font for a popular board game we publish. I replied with a sincere apology and a clear desire to pay for the font (and any penalties for not paying for it when we overstepped). We were able to resolve the matter swiftly and amicably for both parties for a little over $6,000.
Spooky Story #2
After reviewing all of our font licenses, our graphic designer found another instance of a font with a peculiar EULA. It allowed for personal use of their fonts for free, but no products for sale, advertising, social media, or basically marketing of any sort. We proactively contacted the company to let them know about our mistake and our desire to rectify it. They replied with a bill for nearly $60,000. This knocked me out of me seat–it was for one of our middle-tier games, and that cost alone comprised the manufacturing cost of a 10,000-unit print run! Fortunately we were able to negotiate down to a much more palatable–but still expensive–$8,000.
Lessons Learned
Before I touch upon a few things, here’s a general explanation from our graphic designer:
“Typically, when you buy a font and you can use it for most purposes without issue (with certain limitations on reselling and sometimes things like logos are off limits). Larger font houses with coveted and well respected fonts typically charge more for their fonts (say $300 per seat for a font family vs $50 for 1-5 seats a font family) and then just expect that everyone touching it has that license (aka a ’seat’). Clients get use of the designer or agency’s font and for the most part it doesn’t matter how it’s used after that (at least in print) as long as the person setting the type has a valid license to use it.”
Beyond that, here’s what I learned:
- Read your font licenses really carefully. Particularly look at desktop/personal vs commercial use.
- If you have a game that’s has sold or will soon sell over 250k units, that seems to be where the more expensive extended licenses are necessary.
- When securing a font license for a major production, make sure to get full, worldwide, unlimited use for both print and digital.
- Clearly communicate to localization partners what they must do to properly use the “seats” mentioned above.
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I’m fortunate to work with a great graphic designer who wants to do the right thing for her peers, and I’ve learned a lot from Christine during this process. However, I’m not an expert in this field, so if any graphic designers or publishers would like to share other font-related lessons in the comments below, I’d love to lean from you!
UPDATE: I totally missed this excellent video about font rights from Ed at Pencil First Games:
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13 Comments on “A Spooky Warning About Font Rights”
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[…] Font Rights: Due to a combination of unfortunate factors, we learned this year that we didn’t have proper font rights for two fonts we use on specific game boxes. This resulted in a significant expense and some lessons learned the hard way. […]
To this point, both Google Fonts and Adobe Font Libraries (assuming you have access) are available for unlimited commercial use. You can cover a lot of ground with these two collections.
…And Thank You!!! Like so many of your tips, this is excellent guidance. Honestly, I might have missed this in my own production since the bulk of my previous design work was either digital or not for resale.
It sounds like some fonts are deliberately booby trapped – free for personal use and $60K for use in your game art seems wacky. Are there font trolls who operate like patent trolls?
Just as someone that knows nothing about this topic…I assume some fonts (like times new roman, arial, etc) are free to use?
I ask because I always thought that as long as you avoid horrible fonts all would be fine? Can you explain why the choice of font is so important for a game?
MK: Some fonts are free to use for personal use, but things change when you’re selling something (especially when you’re selling a lot of it).
I’m not a graphic designer, so it’s hard to explain why font choice is important for a game. :) As a gamer and reader, I just know that the right font can make something easier and more immersive to use.
I understand that not all are free (obviously, since artists need to pay their bills).
It just seems that there is no equivalent of “stock image” for fonts? As in, you can purchase packages of fonts but from your discussion (and Edo’s video) it seems that each font can have its own rules? Is there no way to pay a flat fee to get access to 100% free fonts?
Those are great questions! I would just be guessing at the answers, but if your research finds anything, feel free to share here. :)
Thanks Jamey for sharing the story and for supporting the design community!
Licensing is quite a complex topic regardless if its for fonts, images, icons, or any other media. Some companies don’t read or even know that fonts (or photos, icons..) have a licence, where others even misuse the license on purpose hoping that nobody will notice it. I think that font creators struggle even more, because an image is easy spotted, where a font misuse is quite harder to detect, and also because we assume that the user uses it with a clear conscience. This goes even so far that some photographers and lawyers in Germany got together and created companies with the only purpose to cash in on the misuse of the licence. They took stock like easy-to-track images of food, vegetables, objects… and publicated them on their website. Then they scanned the web every now and then for them and the lawyers did the rest. And this can end up costing a lot. Like you said Jamey the best thing is to read good the license or even better to let someone who is an expert trow an eye on it before making a commercial use, so you don’t have to face a bad surprise.
Jamey, are you talking about a couple of specialty fonts, or a general thing regarding ‘most’ fonts? When I open Word in Office or any of a number of other programs, I see literally dozens and dozens and dozens of fonts. Would you say your words of warning are a precaution that is applicable to some, most, or all fonts? Thanks.
What I’m saying here could potentially apply to any font, as just because a font is available in Word doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right to use that font in a commercial product.
Thank you for doing the fight thing. So often creative peoples’ work is not recognised for the real work that it is, and that the author needs to pay their bills too.
I’d add in a disclaimer about Images and even SVG items. I know when I was looking into laser cutting things, I went out of my way to read the EULAs and find ones that had commercial use allowed, in order to stay above board. I found things like the this brain icon, which is close to the FFG brain used in their Arkham games https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/human-brain-vector-icon-illustration-isolated-1032920983
This is an important lesson, Jamey! Though I’m not yet published, I always try to look at font license details on the site from which I’m downloading, but don’t usually read the whole EULA. It’s a good reminder that fonts are NOT all free, despite how easy it is to download and use them in one’s work.