The official RPG Maker forums are closing, and there's some good news and some bad news associated with that. The good news: Gotcha Gotcha Games is launching a new forum called RPG Maker Guild, which aims to "provide a welcoming space where RPG Maker creators can connect, share projects, exchange ideas, and continue growing the community together." But the bad news, revealed in a closure FAQ, is that the existing RPG Maker forums are not going to be archived, meaning that a massive amount of history—and useful data and information—is at risk of being lost.
I'm opposed to forum shutdowns as a matter of principle, and I'm still a little sore about EA closing the BioWare forums. But in this case the cultural loss is accompanied, and even outweighed, by the practical hit: As noted by Eurogamer, there are 1.4 million posts on the forum: The Legacy Engine Support forum has more than 280,000 posts spread across 45,600 threads, for instance, while the Javascript Plugins forum has 34,700 threads filled with 276,000 messages.
