RPG Maker to Delete 1.4 Million Forum Posts This December

If you have ever spent hours digging through old forum threads to solve a niche technical problem, you know the specific relief of finding a stranger's post from a decade ago that explains exactly how to fix your issue. For many developers, the RPG Maker forums have been that digital lifeline for 14 years. That is about to change, as developer Gotcha Gotcha Games has announced the platform is closing permanently.

The closure is scheduled for December 11, 2026. Rather than migrating the existing content to the new community platform, RPG Maker Guild, the company intends to delete the current forums entirely. This move will result in the loss of approximately 1.4 million posts, including years of accumulated engine-specific fixes, JavaScript plugin documentation, and community-written tutorials.

The Cost of Losing Community Knowledge

The impact of this deletion extends far beyond simple forum threads. RPG Maker is the engine behind acclaimed titles like OmoriTo the MoonLisa: The PainfulYume Nikki and Corpse Party. For many, the forums were not peripheral—they were a foundational resource that made the engine accessible to non-experts.

The scale of the data loss is significant. The Legacy Engine Support section alone contains over 45,600 threads, while the JavaScript Plugins forum hosts nearly 35,000 threads. These resources are often the only place where specific bugs or workflows are documented. Gotcha Gotcha Games has encouraged users to save whatever they wish to keep personally, but with over a million posts, this expectation is viewed by many in the community as an inadequate solution to a systemic issue.

A Pattern of Digital Erasure

The situation at RPG Maker is part of a broader struggle regarding the internet's memory. The Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network previously found that 87% of classic video games released before 2010 are considered critically endangered, largely due to a lack of digital accessibility.

This is not the first time a major developer has wiped community history. EA previously closed the BioWare forums without archiving them, and the Flash game era was largely lost when Adobe ended support for the platform, only saved by independent efforts like Flashpoint. Similarly, the Final Fantasy IX Brady Games strategy guide famously directed players to a now-defunct web portal, leaving the physical book as a guide to non-existent digital resources.

The Future of Preservation

While the situation for the official RPG Maker forums looks bleak, there are some efforts to mitigate the damage. Jason Scott, a prominent archivist, has indicated that the Internet Archive intends to assist in preserving the data. However, these efforts are often reactive, attempting to save information that should have been maintained by the original platform holders.

The core problem remains that digital knowledge is often treated as a liability rather than an asset. As platforms shift and hosting costs rise, the information that powers our creative tools is increasingly left to evaporate. For developers currently working in RPG Maker, the upcoming deletion means that the solutions to technical problems found yesterday may simply be gone tomorrow.