RPG Maker's official forums will shut down by year's end

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

https://twitter.com/x/status/2065207952794177889

This will be a tragedy on multiple levels for anyone even remotely interested in game-making and the history thereof.

And, as it's often the case, a loss that's entirely preventable.

Just shit news all-around.

 

[gwardojones]

Man, that's a bummer... I used RPG Maker for years as a kid. I learned to write by coming up with stories for my RPG Maker games, which then turned into a ten-year writing career as an adult. Hopefully the content on the forums can be preserved in the WayBackMachine, or something similar. Seeing other people's creations always inspired me to try harder with my own projects.

 

[dilsworth]

My sister gifted me RPG Maker VX Ace so I wanted to whip up an RPG of my own with the same battle system VX Ace had. I had this Notepad with tons of ideas that I plan on adding (especially with TONS of references from anime, manga, tokusatsu, fanmade and other games), but in this year and thinking about it...seems like it's too good to be true. I may have to cut off A LOT/readjust some portions just to avoid oversaturation of references and stick to originality.

That and the drawing for my status screen too since my artstyle went a little different direction from what it used to be before.

 

[ShinnAsukaYESTaylorSwiftNO]

I have said this before but I will say it again - Reddit & Tumblr and their concequences have been a disaster for the internet.

Post automatically merged: Today at 8:12 AM

Man, that's a bummer... I used RPG Maker for years as a kid. I learned to write by coming up with stories for my RPG Maker games, which then turned into a ten-year writing career as an adult. Hopefully the content on the forums can be preserved in the WayBackMachine, or something similar. Seeing other people's creations always inspired me to try harder with my own projects.

Get ready to fire up Browsertrix + ReplayWeb.page then

 

[JiruleanSkies]

They have a Steam forum that I assume they're going to continue using, right...? (I hope).
Even if that's the case, of course, that still cuts out a small minority of people who don't have a Steam account - IE me.

Publically accessible forums without any additional layers of crap to register (like this one!) are getting kind of rare. On top of that, forums always feel like the best way to keep information and solutions to problems organized, so I feel like they should always be the priority to have for software like this.
If we assume they'd stop the Steam one, too, then presumably everyone will either need to fumble around the weird ghost-town style servers of Discord or presumably smack their head off a chatbot in a desperate attempt to get an answer to a question, rip.

This does suck a bit.

 

[da4rkdude]

first unity then rpg maker... whats going on? why couldn't we stay in the 2000s forever?

 

[contrail_]

Shouldn't be that hard to back up a forum and put it on archive. I don't expect it to take up more than 1TB. If somebody bothered to backup only the tutorials and attachments, without spammy discussions, avatars, etc, it should take up way less space.
By the way, I'm kind of surprised that forum is only 14 years old.

 

[Ikagura]

Another Alexandria has burnt down...

 

[jon2]

Is their entire site on Web Archive already?

 

[Imad1998]

Someone really needs to archive all this mess.

 

[beefbowl]

I'm pretty sure there will be an effort to archive all of it. They archived all of Myrient in like a week, I'm sure this'll take less than that if the archiver community forms swiftly.

 

[Aldia Aldia]

I found this out earlier and it actually ruined my morning. :(

I'm sure there'll be a noble effort to archive as many things as possible from there, but as always there'll be things left out because of the sheer volume of content being dealt with. Also, losing such a huge and official communication channel is nothing short of a tragedy.

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

I hate to say it, but a lot of sites (including many I'm interested in) have built-in measures that prevent them from being crawled by Alexa/WebArchive, resulting on massive gaps and losses... all in the name of saving some bandwidth.

Could it be done? Absolutely, but it'd require a titanic effort and gargantuan coordination, both of which would be hard to pull off even with a clear advanced notice (I'm still salty about the destruction of a site that gave us a five-year headstart and its pitifully incomplete archive).

 

[ArchienineZXAdventArchienineZXAdvent's icon]

Never played a RPGMaker game, but still makes me sad.

 

[tonyhoro]

Hope they aren't thinking about moving to a cool modern trend like Discord, because we already have enough communities locked behind discord servers that will be lost in the future.

 

[Advil Lavs]

Why is the forum closing? Are there really that few people that still use it? I hope someone tries to archive the stuff from it though, otherwise we might lose some games too.