After a lengthy 14 years or so, RPG Maker is closing the door on its beloved online community forum – a choice that, unsurprisingly, isn’t exactly going over well with users.
If you’re out of the loop, RPG Maker is pretty much a holy grail for many indie devs. It allows folks – even those of us (like me) with little to no coding or development experience – to create games and then share them.
Some notable examples include horror projects like Ib and Omori, but there are plenty out there – so many, in fact, that Steam had an RPG Maker tag on its store in the past to sort them all. Put simply, it’s an amazingly accessible game engine.
Along with the program came an online web forum where users could share their tutorials, guides, tips, and more with one another, or seek advice and the like. Think Reddit, basically, but RPG Maker-oriented – that’s what the forum is.
It’s been chugging along for 14 years now, with posts from 2012 still up and available to view. But, sadly, this apparently won’t be the case for much longer as the website is set to go down.
A new post on the forum details the situation with the shutdown. So, why is this happening?
“As part of upcoming changes to the community management structure,” the update explains, “the official RPG Maker forum will transition to a new platform operated by Gotcha Gotcha Games Inc. This transition is intended to support the continued growth of the RPG Maker community under the new forum.”
As part of that process, “the current forum will be retired” on December 11 this year – and no, there won’t be any backups.
“There are currently no plans to provide a public archive or backup of the current forum once it has been closed,” as the post outlines. It does “encourage users to save any posts, guides, resources, or other content they wish to keep before the forum closure” – which, erm, isn’t exactly ideal for the site’s many users.
One person comments, “This is unfortunate.” Another exclaims, “Why delete these forums? This will be insanely bad for the community as a whole, having to restart from scratch for so many resources and topics previously discussed. There’s almost 15 years of information and resources on here; there’s no way someone could download/backup everything they need. If you’re making a new forum, fine, but keep these open to read through…”
Honestly, I get it – and all of the other replies (of which there are loads) echo this sentiment. It doesn’t look like the hosts are willing to budge, though, and ahead of the full closure, “certain forum features will be disabled” early. Oof.
Searching for something to wishlist? Here are some of the best new games coming this year and beyond to look forward to.
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