With the official RPG Maker Web forums closing in December and no public archive planned, the community is racing to rescue tens of thousands of tutorials, plugins, and devlogs that shaped a generation of indie RPGs.
The official RPG Maker Web forums are about to go dark, and with them a huge chunk of modern indie RPG history is at risk of vanishing.
On December 11, 2026, the long‑running boards that have supported creators across RPG Maker VX Ace, MV, MZ and beyond will be shut down as publisher Gotcha Gotcha Games transitions to a new platform called RPG Maker Guild. According to the closure FAQ, there are no plans for a public archive or backup of the existing forum once it goes offline. Users have simply been told to save any posts they want to keep.
For most game communities, losing a forum is painful. For RPG Maker, it is catastrophic. The site holds nearly 15 years of accumulated development knowledge, including tutorials, engine-deep scripting tips, plugins, art assets, jam entries, project feedback, and bug-fix threads that solved problems almost no one bothered to document anywhere else.
Eurogamer reports the forum currently stores more than 1.4 million messages across tens of thousands of threads. Polygon notes that the engine has powered everything from cult classics like Yume Nikki to breakout hits like Omori, Lisa: The Painful, and To the Moon, and that many of the techniques behind those games were incubated or debugged in these very threads.
What exactly is being lost?
The scale of what might disappear is difficult to overstate because the RPG Maker Web forums were never just a place to chat. They functioned as a living, evolving manual for multiple engines.
There are step-by-step tutorials for first-time devs learning how to script cutscenes or create basic encounters. There are multi-part deep dives that explain how to fake lighting, parallax mapping, or action battle systems inside tools that were never really built for them. Entire subforums are dedicated to plugin and script releases, with pages of follow-up posts clarifying edge cases, performance quirks, and compatibility patches.
Then there are the devlogs. RPG Maker has always attracted solo creators, hobbyists, and small teams. Many used the official forum as their production diary, posting weekly or monthly updates for years. Those threads show how certain games evolved from prototype to release, cataloguing design decisions, cut features, and post-launch patch work. In a medium where small projects often disappear the moment a download link dies, those devlogs have quietly acted as primary sources for anyone studying the craft of small-scale RPG design.
The support sections are just as significant. If you wanted to know why a certain battle event desynced, what caused a memory leak on a specific version of MV, or how to work around a hardcoded limitation in VX Ace, the most complete answer was usually on the official forum, buried a few pages into a thread from 2015. PC Gamer’s breakdown of the closure points out that users are furious precisely because so many of those hard-won solutions were never mirrored to wikis or official docs.
Tutorials and plugins that powered a scene
RPG Maker’s renaissance over the last decade is tied directly to community-made plugins and scripts. The Web forums were a central distribution point and feedback loop for those tools.
Scripters and plugin authors uploaded experimental systems, built custom UIs, layered new combat mechanics on top of the default battle system, and often stuck around for years to maintain their work. Polygon highlights that many of the features players now take for granted in polished RPG Maker releases, like menu overhauls, QOL improvements, and cinematic combat presentation, originated as shared forum plugins before spreading across the wider engine ecosystem.
Losing the forum does not automatically erase those scripts; many creators mirrored their work to GitHub, itch.io, or personal sites. The problem is context. Dependencies, compatibility notes, bug reports, and unofficial forks are often scattered through long discussion chains. When someone releases a major engine update or a new version of a plugin, the changelog and the “if you’re using X, make sure you also update Y” posts usually live inside those threads.
For newer creators, the forum has also functioned as a curated discovery layer. You might come looking for a basic enemy AI tweak and leave with a set of plugins that transform the entire feel of your game. Once the boards are gone, the community will lean heavily on word-of-mouth and incomplete third-party lists, which will make it that much harder to onboard into the tools that define modern RPG Maker projects.
The community scramble to preserve everything
The announcement has triggered a race against time. Across Reddit, ResetEra, rpgmaker.net and the forums themselves, users are coordinating ad hoc archiving efforts. Some are spidering public threads with custom scripts. Others are saving individual guides and reposting them to independent wikis or Google Drive collections. A few of the bigger plugin authors are compiling "everything you need" packs that combine their scripts with documentation and example projects.
Eurogamer’s reporting highlights how impossible it is for the community to truly capture the entire forum in a matter of months. With over a million posts, even automated scraping will miss private messages, embedded downloads that have already expired, and offsite images that will inevitably break. There is also the question of consent and copyright, since many posts mix original assets with licensed material that cannot simply be mirrored anywhere.
Despite those hurdles, the grassroots response has been immediate. Some long-time moderators and contributors are prioritizing key resources like beginner tutorials, engine reference threads, and historically important plugin collections. Others are focusing on preserving landmark devlogs and jam pages that chart how the community grew from the VX era into today’s MZ and Unite ecosystem.
The resulting patchwork of backups will never be as complete or searchable as the original forum. But without any official archiving plan from Gotcha Gotcha Games, it is the only safety net creators currently have.
Why this matters beyond RPG Maker
RPG Maker’s tools have always sat at the low-friction end of game development, where people with more ideas than time or budget learn what it means to ship something. Many developers who moved on to Unity, Unreal, or custom engines started with RPG Maker because the barrier to entry was so low. Those first projects often depended on the very tutorials and plugins now in danger of falling into a black hole.
Losing this history is not just about nostalgia for a beloved message board. It erases a visible path into game creation, one that shows how someone with no coding experience can use prebuilt systems, community scripts, and incremental feedback to build something that resonates with players. From preservationists’ perspective, the forum’s closure without an archive is the digital equivalent of discarding shelves of design notebooks.
For the broader industry, it is another warning sign. As more development happens on proprietary platforms with limited export options, the long-term survival of game-making knowledge increasingly depends on the goodwill of platform holders. When a company chooses not to archive a decade of material, the gap they create is not theoretical. It affects the next wave of creators who come looking for help and find nothing but broken links.
The road to RPG Maker Guild
Gotcha Gotcha Games’ plan is to move the community to a new official home called RPG Maker Guild. According to the closure FAQ and reports from outlets like GamesRadar and Dexerto, the Guild is meant to modernize how discussions, support, and asset-sharing work across different engines and regions.
In theory, a cleaner site with better integration between news, docs, and community posts could be good for new users who might find the current forum structure archaic and hard to navigate. But the way this transition is being handled leaves a crucial gap between "future-facing hub" and "historical archive." The new Guild will launch without the rich back catalog that gave the old boards their value.
The backlash is not about resisting change. It is about the lack of continuity. Moving to a better platform while leaving behind 15 years of work feels, to many, like shipping a sequel that ignores the save data from every previous game.
What creators can do right now
For anyone currently developing in RPG Maker, the immediate advice from community leaders and even the official FAQ is simple: back up everything. If a guide or thread has been vital to your project, save it in a format you control. If you rely on a niche plugin maintained through a forum thread, grab every version and changelog you can find.
At the same time, consider contributing to broader preservation efforts. That might mean helping organize mirrored tutorials on an independent wiki, assisting a plugin author as they consolidate their work to a central repository, or volunteering to maintain new community hubs outside the official ecosystem.
No matter what Gotcha Gotcha Games ultimately does with RPG Maker Guild, the long-term health of the scene will depend on redundant, community-run spaces that do not vanish the moment a company reorganizes its web presence.
A pivotal moment for a foundational tool
RPG Maker has spent decades as a quiet pillar of the indie landscape, powering everything from experimental horror vignettes to emotional story-first RPGs that never could have existed at AAA scale. The impending forum shutdown crystallizes a hard truth about that legacy. The tools themselves can survive and even improve, but if the knowledge around them is allowed to vanish, the barrier to entry rises and fewer people will be able to follow in the footsteps of the creators who came before.
Whether this moment becomes a footnote or a fracture in RPG Maker’s history will depend on how much of the old forum the community manages to rescue in the weeks and months ahead, and on whether the custodians of the engine recognize that preserving the past is just as important as building the next toolset.