RPG Maker Forums Are Shutting Down With No Archive Plan, Putting 15 Years of Indie Dev History at Risk
The official RPG Maker forums are shutting down, and nearly 15 years of tutorials, project threads, and community knowledge could vanish with them.
Here’s the thesis, plain and brutal: letting the RPG Maker forums go dark without a proper archive isn’t a minor inconvenience — it’s a preventable act of cultural destruction.
Per Eurogamer and PC Gamer, roughly 15 years of community knowledge is sitting on those servers right now: tutorials, project threads, bug fixes, asset-sharing posts, and thousands of conversations between developers who built their entire indie careers in that space. No partial archive, no migration plan announced — just a clock counting down on a decade and a half of indie RPG history.
To feel the scale of that: 15 years covers every major RPG Maker release from VX through MZ — an entire generational arc of indie dev tooling. The developers who shipped their first game on VX, iterated on Ace, and eventually moved to MZ all left breadcrumbs in those forums. That institutional memory doesn’t exist anywhere else. The forum predates most modern social-media platforms as a serious dev community. Reddit wasn’t the indie-dev water cooler yet. Discord didn’t exist. The RPG Maker forums were the place, and for a lot of people, they still are.
When the forums go dark, so does the institutional memory of thousands of developers who learned their craft there. A first-time game maker Googling
