Gotcha Gotcha Games, the current owner of RPG Maker, plans to shut down the official RPG Maker forums, forcing the community to migrate to a platform users actively dislike. The decision eliminates decades of archived discussions, tutorials, and troubleshooting threads that have served as institutional knowledge for indie developers using the engine.
The forums hosted countless posts about game development workflows, technical solutions, and community showcases spanning multiple RPG Maker versions. Deleting these resources removes a searchable archive that newer developers relied on when learning the engine. Unlike Reddit or Discord, forum threads provided structured, categorized knowledge that persisted across years.
Gotcha Gotcha Games has not announced preservation plans for this content. The company instead directs users toward an alternative platform that the community has rejected for lacking the original forums' organizational structure and discoverability. This mirrors larger industry trends of corporations eliminating community infrastructure to consolidate users onto controlled, corporate-owned spaces.
The RPG Maker community built substantial projects using this engine, from Undertale to Fire Emblem fan games. Many developers credit the forums for their early learning curve. Losing this archive impacts not just current users but future developers who would study how problems got solved across RPG Maker versions.
The closure underscores a broader problem. When corporations acquire indie tools or communities, they often strip resources deemed unprofitable, regardless of long-term cultural impact. The forums represented free labor from moderators and contributors documenting workflows for the entire RPG development ecosystem. Gotcha Gotcha Games treats this as legacy infrastructure worth eliminating rather than preserving.
Developers have begun advocating for the company to open-source the forum data or export it for community archival. Whether the publisher backs down remains unclear. This decision will likely fragment RPG Maker's knowledge base across Discord servers, Reddit threads, and personal blogs,