There are quite a few open source or royalty free Japanese fonts (Google Fonts has 50[1]).
But, as everyone else has mentioned, font usage in games (and most creative visual works) is more particular than just the bare minimum of "does it actually render the glyphs". Imagine if all text in your favourite game was all Times New Roman, it would make the game worse.
It's the same for some non-Japanese games who don't take the time to think it through, worse case scenario is when they use Chinese fonts.
Because Japanese and Chinese characters are slightly different, but Unicode decided to unify them under the same codes....
I remember that PES6 was the only PES to get Polish translation. The start screen wouldn't render correctly because the font was missing the glyph Ś.
Alternately, imagine if all text in your favorite game was IP owned by some random third party that could ruin everything one or two years down the line.
Perhaps it is time for more people to invest in royalty free IP? We are seeing a bit of a tragedy of the commons type of situation going down, right now.
Sounds like one should be able to get a long way if you put down, say, 2 years of the new license fee and then never have to pay again
I guess the trouble is that game companies can't really band together and pool money to make a good font since the point is to look unique, so this only works for the largest studios. Otoh, at least for now, the smaller ones might stay below the 25k user limit
I grew up in russia and every localized game always had godawful ugly thin fonts. I would always watch foreign gameplay videos with jealousy cause they had beautiful latin fonts.
Now it's been years since I played a game in russian (almost a decade at this point I think) and I am so glad I don't have to put up with that anymore. Once in a while I see a screenshot from a cyrillic-using language translated game and probably half of the time the fonts are still bad.