// PC GAMER — GAMING
RPG Maker forums are closing, nearly 15 years of knowledge and online culture are at risk of being wiped
Gotcha Gotcha Games is launching a new forum, which is good, but says it won't archive the old one, which is very bad.
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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.
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.
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