RPG Maker’s official forum closes December 11 with no archive planned

Gotcha Gotcha Games announced on June 11 that the official RPG Maker Web forum will go read-only on June 18 and shut down permanently on December 11, 2026. The forum is being retired as part of a transition to a new platform called RPG Maker Guild, operated by Gotcha Gotcha Games. The problem is the FAQ that accompanies the announcement: there are currently no plans to provide a public archive or backup of the old forum once it closes. Every post, guide, attachment, image, and private message gets deleted. Accounts do not transfer.

The scale of what that means is hard to overstate. According to the Eurogamer coverage, the forum holds over 1.4 million messages, including roughly 45,600 threads on legacy engine support alone and over 34,000 threads on JavaScript plugins. RPG Maker has been the entry point for hobbyist and indie game development for decades — games like Omori, Corpse Party, and To the Moon were built with it, and the history of their development lives in those forum posts alongside countless tutorials, plugin libraries, and community discussions that new developers still pull from today.

Community members have organized archival efforts, including a Discord dedicated to backing up content, and the Wayback Machine remains an option. But manual archival of 1.4 million messages before a December deadline is an enormous ask, and crowdsourced saves will not replicate the searchability of the original. The read-only window closes the door on active discussion this week. If Gotcha Gotcha Games reverses course and commits to a proper archive in response to community pressure, that would be worth watching for — but right now the official position is that the content disappears in December.