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The official RPG Maker forums are closing, and there's some good news and some bad news associated with that. The good news: Gotcha Gotcha Games is launching a new forum called RPG Maker Guild, which aims to "provide a welcoming space where RPG Maker creators can connect, share projects, exchange ideas, and continue growing the community together." But the bad news, revealed in a closure FAQ, is that the existing RPG Maker forums are not going to be archived, meaning that a massive amount of history—and useful data and information—is at risk of being lost.

I'm opposed to forum shutdowns as a matter of principle, and I'm still a little sore about EA closing the BioWare forums. But in this case the cultural loss is accompanied, and even outweighed, by the practical hit: As noted by Eurogamer, there are 1.4 million posts on the forum: The Legacy Engine Support forum has more than 280,000 posts spread across 45,600 threads, for instance, while the Javascript Plugins forum has 34,700 threads filled with 276,000 messages.

That is a massive amount of data, and if you've ever found yourself quietly thanking some anonymous hero who posted the fix for your extremely niche but insurmountable technical problem that they also encountered back in 2013, you know why people are reacting so strongly to its loss.

"Closing the forums is already bad enough, but no proper archive? Seriously?" one user wrote in response to the announcement. "Years and years of community knowledge, plugins, tutorials, bug fixes, troubleshooting threads, scripts, resources, devlogs, conversations, and historical context are just supposed to disappear because people didn’t manually download everything in time?"

"Wouldn't have completed my game, One Fenix Down, without these forums and the community," another said. "This is simply a terrible decision."

They're going to wipe out the rpg maker forums to promote their new one? The rpg maker forums are like 20 years of history and help for people using their software. Every time I struggled making something for Look Outside, I found an old thread on those forums to help. Extremely hostile of them.

— @frankiepixel.bsky.social (@frankiepixel.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.618Z

It's impossible to overestimate how important the RPG Maker community is to video games, so many classic games in the past 35 years were either made by the community or inspired by them.To see one of their main knowledge banks nonchalantly wiped away like this is disgusting.

— @felipepepe.bsky.social (@felipepepe.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.866Z

I love RPGMaker but one of the things that keeps me from using it is that there’s not a lot of tutorials on how to do stuff written for someone with no idea on how the engine works — shutting this down seems REAL dumb

— @beanjbunny.bsky.social (@beanjbunny.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.714Z

GotchaGotchaGames dropped today that they're shutting down the official rpgmaker forums next week, and taking down access entirely come December...Final Profit wouldn't exist without these forums, there's so much knowledge about to be lost. I'm mortified.forums.rpgmakerweb.com/forums/impor...

— @finalprofit.bsky.social (@finalprofit.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.790Z

No one understands the RPG Maker community less than the ppl that make RPG Maker

— @whatsmocca.bsky.social (@whatsmocca.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.532Z

The game industry's difficulty with maintaining institutional knowledge is something we've touched on in recent years, but even by the standards of big-money corporations, this is egregious: A massive, user-built treasure trove of information, valuable specifically to RPG Maker's users, being put to the torch because... well, I don't know why, really.

And if there is reason, Gotcha Gotcha Games isn't saying, which you'd think it would be eager to do if it could. Its only statement on the matter is, "There are currently no plans to provide a public archive or backup of the current forum once it has been closed."

There are two bright spots amidst this encroaching darkness. First, the axe isn't falling for another half-year: New account registrations for the forum have already been disabled and on June 18 the old forum will be switched to read-only mode, meaning no new posts will be allowed. But the forum will stay online until December 11—Gotcha Gotcha Games is encouraging users "to save any posts, guides, resources, or other content they wish to keep before the forum closure."

That's a decent window of time, but even so it's a monumental task. Which leads to the second bit of brightness: Jason Scott, perhaps the online world's foremost archivist, said (or at least unmistakably implied) that help is on the way from Internet Archive:

The sky has blackened over rpgmakerweb with Archive Team crawlers

— @textfiles.com (@textfiles.com.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.920Z

That's great news, but I still very much hope that once Gotcha Gotcha Games sees the backlash, it reverses course and provides some kind of official archive for the old forums, or just leaves them up in read-only. The Internet Archive is an invaluable tool (and by the way, if you find it useful you can kick 'em a little money to help keep the lights on), but nothing beats the real thing.