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.