You'll have to get two metric tons of flack from people who believe whatever works for them for each head you convince. But I'll point Albert here and see if he thinks it's worth a bother.

BTW, Linotype Maral took about 800 hours for the Regular and Bold (no italics). But it was my second outline font - I can do it a bit faster now. But not in an hour, like those guys probably think.

hhp

I've never made a font, and I've only made small promotional games, but I'm guessing that a game like half-life 2 would have taken many many times more hours than FF Din. I haven't checked the prices of either, but I would guess that FF Din costs more than a copy of half-life 2.

But its not really about the hours, is it?
You would assume that game designers feel that their role is a creative one, and probably the programmers do too. Designing and creating a typeface is also a creative role. The cost of both products includes a premium for the creativity of their designers. The size of the potential market is also a factor, as well as the composition of that market in terms of individuals or businesses.
There are so many other factors that determine the price of a product that to reduce it to how many hours it took to create is irrelevant.

Now Mr. 'FF DIN is a very basic looking font' has to answer the question:
If it didn't take very long, and its easy, why did he want to steal someone else's work instead of just knocking up a clean, basic font himself?

A friend and designer I know explained why he charges so much for a logo. "It took me 20yrs of experience to get to the point where I can design something in a short period of time." Point being hours on a project are a relatively poor way of measuring quality.

Even if FF Din, the complete family with alternates and all, only cost the same as a copy of Half-Life 2, or even just $20, people (especially people like our friend here) would still rip it off.

It's classic rights management and licencing. Let the RIAA handle him.

Aaron

If the font is posted on the site the best course of action would be for the fonts owner to send a polite email to the sites owner asking for the font to be taken off the site. I�ve found this to work in nine out of ten of the cases I�ve been involved in.

Well, it looks like they're only posting the font resource that comes with the game files anyway, which I believe doesn't have a complete character set. So, while that's not great, it's not terrible.

My little tirade on the site was meant to be an indirect heads-up to the site moderators to cover their asses and quash any piracy, but we'll see.

Ironically, Half-Life 2 can cost from $55 up to $80 depending on which version you get via retail outlets (the collector's version has all sorts of goodies).

Another interesting note, Valve, the developer, is spearheading a new online content distribution method called Steam. On this platform, there's a $90 version. The interesting part is that it's an actual application that runs on your machine. You actually have to have a web connection to activate their products which is done via an application on your PC. A bit of remote DRM on their part. Considering how open these gamers are to letting Valve crawl onto their PCs and control their software, and the amount of $$ it takes to get a PC to even play the game decently, I'm surprised they're so defensive about $40.

This is certainly interesting. If they�re posting the font for all the world to see I�m sure they�ve properly licensed the font. However, the feeling I have is that most games developers ignore font licenses and include derivative (mostly bitmap fonts) within games without getting permission from the fonts owner. Getting permission, or a license for these rights seems to be the exception rather than the rule. I think the game developers and the font vendors are both partially to blame�

Games developers have always done this, they don�t read the licenses and even if they did this issue is not dealt with very well. Even if they know what they�re doing is wrong they don�t expect to get caught.

Font vendors themselves don�t seem to be particularly bothered with this type of misuse. They see the outlines as being their crown jewels and are not too concerned about bitmaps being distributed (see c. 1997 comments from LettError et al re. embedding) � some might even think it�s cool to have their fonts used in a top-selling game. Also even if they�re loosing a bit of difficult to recover revenue from extended license sales this type of use isn�t eating into other sales in same way as other forms of piracy might.

Cheers, Si

> not too concerned about bitmaps

Which is pretty dumb of course considering what we actually read more these days!

hhp