RPG Maker Official Forums Shutting Down, Deleting 14+ Years of Community Resources
Gotcha Gotcha Games has announced it will permanently delete the official RPG Maker forums on December 11, 2026, erasing 14 years of tutorials, plug-ins, and community resources with no official archive or backup planned. The forums, active since 2012, contain over 1.4 million messages and have been a foundational resource for indie developers behind games like Omori, Lisa the Painful, and To the Moon. The deletion threatens to sever a critical knowledge base for current and future developers, prompting urgent community-led archival efforts.
Gotcha Gotcha Games announced on June 11, 2026, that it is shutting down the official RPG Maker forums at rpgmakerweb.com and replacing them with a new platform called RPG Maker Guild. New account registrations were disabled immediately, posting will be disabled on June 18 as the site goes read-only, and all content will be permanently deleted on December 11, 2026. Critically, the company confirmed there are no plans for a public archive or backup, meaning over 1.4 million posts — including tutorials, plug-in download pages, and legacy engine support threads containing tens of thousands of discussions — will be wiped entirely. Community members have reacted with anger and urgency, forming Discord servers to coordinate manual backups and calling on the Wayback Machine as a last resort. The move is complicated by the fact that the old forum was operated by Gotcha Gotcha Games' former publisher Komodo, following the two companies' split, which may explain the decision not to maintain the existing infrastructure. Critics have noted that a read-only archive would cost relatively little to maintain, and the deletion has drawn comparisons to broader concerns about digital preservation in gaming, including the Stop Killing Games movement. The replacement platform, RPG Maker Guild, has itself been criticized by users for poor UI and a lack of features.
What's missing
No statement has been provided explaining why a read-only archive was deemed infeasible.
How coverage differed
Eurogamer framed the story with measured sympathy, acknowledging some rationale for the platform move and highlighting the community's emotional response. Polygon and Dexerto were more critical, with Polygon calling it 'hard to imagine a more self-destructive move' and Dexerto drawing explicit comparisons to the Stop Killing Games movement, framing the deletion as a betrayal of the community that made the product viable.
What different sources said
- DexertoCenter
RPG Maker is deleting 14 years of community content and fans have days to save them
- PolygonCenter
RPG Maker users could lose years of important history as official forums shut down
- EurogamerCenter
RPG Maker forum users are racing to archive almost 15 years of valuable resources, as game engine maker announces impending move
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