Another day, another breathtakingly-stupid decision by a megacorporation. What a surprise.
Arial is one of the most universal fonts across the entirety of the internet (even on here!!!). Why are you removing it? Who asked for this? (Hint: it’s a nice, round number)
Gotham is a modern font which is, again, one of the most universal fonts across the Internet and design space, both on and off-platform. Why are you removing it? Again, who on earth asked for this?
Once again, decisions are being taken unilaterally without any consultation by a corporation that does not care in the slightest about its developers.
Nobody asked for this. Stop deciding to randomly remove features without asking your developers.
This is a cool update, but it would be even cooler if you hadn’t felt the need to replace two fonts without real context or reason. Additionally, you’re not open-sourcing this font or linking to a font page like Adobe Fonts, where you can actually use the font.
so on that note it kinda makes this update sorta worthless you gaining little and losing more ?
After a while of usage, I’ve started to notice some odd inaccuracies in Builder Sans.
Circled in red are concave corners that are quite rounded and look very off, especially when in bold. There are also a few small things that I would say are mistakes:
You should submit a bug report or look for one, this doesn’t seem like intended behaviour. If you don’t have perms to post message @Bug-Support in the format of a bug report and they’ll repost it for you!
I like the Builder Font and may use it for certain UIs, although, why remove Gotham? It was perfectly fine as a font (unline Arial, I’m glad to see that thing go)
When will their be more popular or well known fonts like Comic Sans?
As orangewarrior78 said, it is due to licensing. Here’s an explanation for people who really want to know the details lol .
The Arial and Gotham fronts are privately owned licensed fronts. Monotype Imaging licenses Arial for a fee and so does Hoefler & Co. with the Gotham font.
Fonts like Montserrat and Arimo are open fonts (like open source software) with libre usage terms: Using OFL fonts (really cool). On the other hand for example, Hoefler & Co. wants 719 USD yearly to license their fronts for use on a website with 1 million page views a month. However for an app they want you to reach out to them for “flexible enterprise licensing options”, from my experience with enterprise hardware and software, that is speak for: “This is going to cost you a crapton of money, way more than your yearly paycheck!)”.
Now imagine Roblox’s scale, take for example just looking at the current player count for one front page Roblox game, I see 65,482 people playing, woah, that’s a lot of players! From a business perspective like with the oof sound, they’re going to go with the free option (OFL fonts) or the option where they don’t have to continually pay increasing license costs (make their own front like Builder).
Anyways maybe when USD buying of store assets is added, Roblox will setup some agreement to allow individual developers to purchase them for a “reasonable” fee to use in their experience but who knows. Hoefler & Co. is offering a generous savings of $0 for their 1 monthly page views license!
Also yeah, I do find that kind of annoying the Roblox fonts license won’t let you use Builder in thumbnails or promotional related things to your game. I’d personally stick with the OFL fonts for now.
P.S. yes fonts faces are copyrightable works.
Arial doesn’t require a license for personal use, which is why it’s commonly used as the default font in many programs. For Roblox, they would need a commercial license
Will there be any intentions to introduce more fonts from Google Fonts like before? Montserrat isn’t a bad alternative for Gotham, but its readability is not as on par as Gotham. It would be nice if we can get fonts like Red Hat Display, Figtree.
In addition, will there be a plan to introduce custom font importing, where we can embed our own fonts into Roblox? I have bought videogame licenses to some fonts and it would be really nice if I can get to use them here.
Ah yes, the once-every-three-or-so-months platform update that adds a bunch of extra work onto my plate. Was wondering what the next entirely avoidable and unnecessary headache would be! As someone who recently designed an entire user interface around Gotham’s specific scaling, sizing and character spacing, this is infuriating. I don’t even have the energy to properly convey my concerns this time, I’ve been through this song and dance far too many times.
Just adding my voice to echo everyone else’s feedback at this point. Hopefully this post and others like it are useful as ammo to prove to whomever it may concern at Roblox that the fonts are worth keeping around!
solely for the purpose of creating, developing, and modifying, uploading, and publishing UGC Experiences
Given all exerpeinces have thumbnails and icons, I assume it would be ok to use it in them on the platform? There seems to be a lot of unanswered confusion above, and it makes no sense to take down your own font on your own platform. There would be nothing to gain…
Admittedly Gotham was everyone’s favourite font, but for Arial I think it would have made more sense to replace it with a new font like Liberation Sans, which is metrically compatible. Hopefully one day more free fonts are added, or even uploadable if there is some sort of way to verify licencing
Unlike basically any other game engine, Roblox is an online platform that’s constantly changing and evolving, it’s not really comparable. If I chose to go with something like Unreal Engine or Unity I can stick with a specific build and am not forced to update. Furthermore, I could potentially license and import my own fonts there. That’s not currently an option here. Roblox is a different development platform with trade-offs, pros and cons. I’ll gladly take the guaranteed global audience, licensed music library, paid-for server costs and so on in exchange for a headache now and then, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying when it happens.
Even if it is a completely seamless transition (from what I’ve seen in this thread the character spacing is not at all consistent) my main issue here is the fact that they never tell us why these choices are being made in the initial posts. “Hey, we have a new font! These old ones are going away. Deal with it.”
Just because the platform is convenient to use with a few really great benefits doesn’t make the lack of real communication and removal of useful features and resources any less annoying, even if things have been steadily improving over the past year or two. I’m sure from the conversations I had at RDC nobody on either side wants it to be like this.
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