Just a couple of days ago Gotcha Gotcha Games, developer of RPG Maker, announced that it would be permanently shutting down the RPG Maker Forums as it transitions to its newly launched online platform, RPG MAKER GUILD. New registrations have already been disabled, and the forums will become read-only starting June 18, with the website’s closure scheduled for December 11. Additionally, all account information and posts from the old RPG Maker forum will permanently be deleted and not carried over to the new one.
The success of the RPG Maker series is backed by a history of information sharing within the community, and the RPG Maker Forums have housed almost 15 years’ worth of useful tips, know-how, and homemade assets and plugins. Therefore, it’s not surprising that users weren’t so happy with the developers’ decision to completely wipe the website from the internet without properly archiving it.
Addressing the community backlash, Gotcha Gotcha Games announced on June 12 that it would revise its previously stated policy, and that both the Japanese and English sides of the RPG Maker Forums would get archived in the near future. According to their X post, the developers are currently working on adjusting the archiving methods for community assets.
While we still don’t know how exactly the website is going to be archived, the team behind RPG Maker promised that it would provide an update as soon as possible.
Back at the time of the announcement, Gotcha Gotcha Games stated that it fully recognized how significant the damage would be if all access to community-built know-how was permanently lost, however, it also explained that archiving the forums would be difficult to achieve from a copyright perspective. As the copyright for each post or published asset belongs to the poster themself, reposting that content or moving it to another domain may constitute copyright infringement.
That being said, the developers are currently trying to devise a way to safely archive past assets without risking potential copyright infringement.
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