RPG Maker Fans Race to Save 14 Years of Forum Posts Before December 11 Shutdown

Q: Will the secret histories of hit games like Omori be erased when their community forum is deleted?

Yes—unless an official archive is created or community backups succeed, important development history tied to games like *Omori* is at real risk of disappearing. The official RPG Maker forums are due to close on December 11, 2026, and the operator has announced no public archive of the existing site. That matters because the forum holds more than 1.4 million messages built up over years, including tutorials, bug fixes, design discussions, attachments, and project threads that document how RPG Maker games were made. For notable titles such as *Omori*, *Lisa the Painful*, and *To the Moon*, those posts can amount to a partial record of their creative and technical history. A replacement forum is planned on a new platform run by Gotcha Gotcha Games, but there is no indication that the old material will be preserved there. Users say the forum is already being wound down, with posting ending soon and the site becoming read-only before final shutdown. That sharply limits the time available to save material. Experts on digital preservation distinguish between a simple backup and a true archive that remains accessible and trustworthy over time. In this case, there is currently neither an official long-term archive nor a clear migration plan for the old posts. So the “secret histories” of games like *Omori* will not automatically be erased, but they could be if community-led archiving efforts fail to capture them before the forum goes offline.

3 articles · Updated · Kotaku · Jun 12

December 11, 2026 is the cutoff for preserving the 14-year-old RPG Maker Forum after Gotcha Gotcha Games said it will close the site without a public archive.
No official backup plan means users must manually save posts, guides, plugins and scripts, with one fan already recruiting r/DataHoarders to help preserve the material.
45,600 threads and 280,000 messages sit in the Legacy Engine support topic alone, underscoring the scale of resources and development history that could disappear.
Games including Omori, Corpse Party and Fear and Hunger were built with RPG Maker, making the threatened forum records part of a wider indie development archive.
RPG Maker Guild will replace the forum, but the transition has intensified fears that years of community knowledge will be lost rather than carried forward.