Comment by dryark

The Monotype pricing change is brutal, but there’s a workaround. Derive new Japanese font families directly from public-domain sources.

I’ve been working on doing exactly that. Reconstructing clean vector glyphs from old metal-type Japanese books. The quality of those prints is surprisingly high, and they include thousands of kanji in consistent style. With some new technological innovations and a reasonable amount of hard work, you can produce a completely new, fully legal font family without touching any commercial IP.

The method I've devised is proprietary, but I’ll say this: it’s absolutely possible, and the output rivals modern JP fonts.

Given the sudden jump from ~$300/year to ~$20k/year for some devs, I expect more people to go down the “rebuild from PD artifacts” route instead of staying locked to a monopoly.