Just to be clear: You can ship the font files with your game. People have asked us this on numerous occasions and we always say yes! please do!
The terms of the license do say don't redistribute the font files - that's more to prevent people from uploading them to font websites and stuff without our permission.
Anyone who's worried and wants permission in writing can always get in touch with us and we'll be happy to provide it :)
“c. You may use the Product in digital documents and software applications provided that: i. The Product is protected from extraction by the end user so that they may not access the Product on its own outside of your application. ii. Your digital document or application is not designed to serve the same function as the Product, i.e. the document must not allow end-users to use glyphs from the Product for use in their own designs.”
Either change your license or check your lawyer. This very clearly says just leaving the otf file out in the game files as extractable.
Since there are only two of us in our team, and we are both on public record tens of times as saying that it's perfectly fine to do this, you can feel free to just go ahead and ship otf/ttf files with your game. And anyone who wants 100% peace of mind / concrete legal evidence can ask us for a signed letter saying so.
I will look into clarifying the wording in the license, there is clearly a balance to be struck to protect both our rights & our user's rights, but we have been letting people ship otf/ttfs with their games for 10 years now so I hope that gives you some trust in us in the mean time.
Thank you for your response, and I didn’t mean to imply ill will from your part. It’s just that legal stuff is scary, and when the actual document you provide people doesn’t say what you say outside the document, things can be even scarier.
If I may suggest something, I think it would be best if you provided a signed PDF saying what you said here, that it is OK to ship the font files with games. I’d do this as a separate (free) product on itch so anyone who’s ever bought a product from you can download it. That’s only a temporary fix, in my opinion. A real fix would be to remove that clause or reword it in a way that actually explicitly allows font files to be shipped.
Thanks for taking your time with this.
EDIT TO ADD: Remember to put the date on the signed document, with a potential clause saying it is valid for any font produced up to this point, no matter the date of purchase. If you ever release a new font, edit the date on the document and publish it again.
