Overview
- Gotcha Gotcha Games announced the migration to a new official site on Thursday, June 11, and said it will shut the rpgmakerweb.com forums with no public archive.
- The company disabled new account registrations the day of the announcement and will make posting read-only on June 18, giving users one week to organize manual backups.
- Gotcha Gotcha set the final deletion date for December 11, 2026, and its FAQ says every post, attachment, image and private message will be permanently removed.
- Community members immediately formed a Discord to coordinate manual archiving and urged use of services like the Wayback Machine while volunteers highlight the forum’s scale of 1.4 million messages and large specialist threads.
- Critics and preservation activists note the closure raises wider questions about who must preserve game-related knowledge and point to ongoing policy efforts such as the Stop Killing Games movement and proposed California measures.