RPG Maker’s Official Forum Will Close This December With No Public Archive Planned

#News #Video Games #Game Development #Game Engine #IndieDev

After nearly 15 years of cultivating aspiring game developers across a variety of versions of the RPG Maker and housing valuable discussions, resources, and community feedback, the official RPG Maker Forum is shutting down.

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After nearly 15 years of serving as one of the most important online hubs for aspiring RPG developers, the official RPG Maker Web Forum is shutting down.

The team behind RPG Maker, Gotcha Gotcha Games, announced that the long-running RPG Maker Web Forum will become read-only on June 18 before permanently closing on December 11, 2026, with users encouraged to manually save posts, guides, attachments, and other resources they want to preserve. New account creation is already disabled.

The current forum is being retired as part of an upcoming change to the RPG Maker community management structure. The official community will transition to a new platform called RPG MAKER GUILD, which will be operated by Gotcha Gotcha Games Inc.

The current forum will be completely taken offline as a result, with no archive plans. We have reached out to Gotcha Gotcha Games for comment.

"There are currently no plans to provide a public archive or backup of the current forum once it has been closed.

We encourage users to save any posts, guides, resources, or other content they wish to keep before the forum closure. Content that you would like to continue sharing with the community may be reposted on the new forum."

The FAQ also states that current forum accounts will not transfer to the new forum. Users will need to create new accounts for RPG MAKER GUILD, and existing account information, posts, attachments, images, private messages, and other forum data will be deleted when the current forum closes. KOMODO Store purchases and product support, however, will not be affected by the transition.

As a casual RPG Maker user myself, dating back to my high school years and even using the PS1 version of the game creation software, this is incredibly sad news. Surely there must have been a method available that would have involved some form of archival, content migration, or at least just leaving it live and read-only.

RPG Maker Unite

For those unaware, the RPG Maker Forum wasn't just a discussion board; it was a place that thousands of people have used for over a decade to share tutorials, plugins, scripts, assets, demos, and more to get feedback and build the beginnings of their indie game aspirations.

Popular games like To The Moon, breakout success Omori, LISA: The Painful, and many more were made in RPG Maker. As you can imagine, the community is pretty upset, and some community members are taking the archival process into their own hands.

For context, there are over 34,000 forum threads discussing JavaScript plugins, over 45,000 threads discussing support for legacy RPG Maker engines that thousands of people still use to make their games, and more than 1.4M messages on the forum in total. Only a few days to say your goodbyes and just a few months to archive things is not much time.

Users are also being told they may repost their own content on the new RPG MAKER GUILD platform if they want to continue sharing it with the community.

The next version of RPG Maker is coming soon, with last month's official unveiling of RPG Maker U2U. The main standout new feature is an art style inspired by Square Enix's HD-2D presentation popularized in Octopath Traveler.