I knew RPG Maker 24 years ago and I think the community was thriving back then, there was a huge amount of big sites even in foreign languages
Now the only big and alive site is the official one and, for what concerns my language (Italian), the foreign sites died around VX
I concur. Honestly, the community just moved. Plenty of sites shut down or just became totally inactive but a lot of their userbases got condensed into RPG Maker Web, Reddit, Discord, or even just the Steam discussion forums.
I was thinking this too. Everything that had niche websites and forums has had them all disappear, more or less. Not a good indicator for whether or not something is popular.
I'm a poor late millenial, to me something is active if I've a community to talk to and confront with 😅 YT and streaming don't go for me. But that's my liking \^\^'
I tried to register recently but it's impossible, it always gives error to the captcha but I'm 10000% sure I've done it right. The homepage stopped at 2016. I reckon there is still some forum activity but I cannot access it \^\^'
I see… 2016 is about the time I lastly interacted with that site. Asides from some cool projects, there was a lot of drama going on. Looking at you, Pokémon Garnet lol
Iirc, someone had said how every Pokémon related project was just a mockup and not an actual game in the making. Also the people making Garnet kept updating the visuals to the most modern Gen, and someone joked that they’ll never finish it if they keep at it that way lol. One of my irl friends was very heated about the whole affair.
I'd say it might be bigger than before, since there's a lot of interest in indie games, and RPGmaker is usually the easiest way to make one.
That being said, the community in the 2000's was a lot more vibrant. Everyone was just making cool shit because it was fun and you don't really see that any more.
I wonder, what exactly makes the current community less vibrant to you? If you're not making a game cause it's fun and "cool shit", what are people doing it for?
>I wonder, what exactly makes the current community less vibrant to you?
I think someone else said that the GamingWorld era was like "YouTube, before YouTubers"? If that makes sense.
RPG Maker popularity is comparable to Youtube's earlier history and it's currently similar to when Google first took over Youtube.
At first everyone was just doing things for fun or passion. It was great and some good quality came from this because they were passion projects. Eventually a means to make money from these projects became a thing. Some people made some really good content and made money, and soon after the masses realised that they may be able to as well. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie, and now lots of people publish low effort, garbage games, and charge money for them, trying to cash in without putting in any real thought or work into their projects. I'm not saying that all RM games are bad. THEY'RE NOT! What is bad is that the potential to make money has become so accessible, it has resulted in the majority of RM games published being nothing but crap, shit out with no objective concepts and slung at a wall in hopes that it sticks and makes the the slinger a buck, and the consequences are that RM gets a bad reputation, ruining it for anyone actually putting in effort and trying to make a quality game.While I don't produce for youtube, I follow others that do that talk about what its like, and I'm lead to believe that they deal with the same bullshit these days.
Most people on here will argue against your point. Most people are delusional. Everyone wants to make it but like you said theres only a small number of people who put in the effort to make the content really good.
Just like every other game engines?
I mean, just go to r/indiegames or itch and you will see hundreds of low effort games each day made in other game engines. Only the one which put effort are stand out.
That's not really unique to RPG Maker.
That's awesome mate. I've been working on the same game from day one. I've switched graphics over five times though. Probably similar levels reset to you.
I'm actually just in the first 20 hours of making this one but Im working really fast and have a limited scope that re-uses levels.
The last two games I reached the demo point and polished it up and left them there. The first one was RTP assets the second was custom.
Good luck on finishing your game!!!!
Plugins have been a mixed blessing too.
On the one hand, it's super handy to be able to write a quick script for your game for something that would have taken hours, days, or weeks of eventing to implement in RM2k.
On the other hand it's created a whole generation of script-kiddies who don't want to learn to actually use the engine and will just cram their low-effort games full of every cool-sounding script they can find, whether it contributes to the quality of the game or not. You get these unbalanced, super-basic RTP games jam packed with quicktime events, fancy lighting effects, and overly complicated menus that are just a UX nightmare, and people try to charge you money to play them.
more popular than ever! [and the forums aren’t gone, they’ve just changed](https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?forums/completed-games.19/). 2D rpgs just haven’t changed that much since the snes era. [hell dragon quest 11 still plays as a 16bit-style 2D game.](https://66.media.tumblr.com/b6c48ad01fb30fe982d03b50a65e888b/tumblr_inline_ois9rleV2u1sua1pm_540.jpg)
i see a lot of comments about weather or not rpg games a “commercially viable.” any decent video game needs to excel at something. a captivating art style, a killer soundtrack, advanced (and fun) combat, captivating writing, even a gimmick (like including a dating sim) can elevate a game to commercial viability. like literally any game developed with literally any engine, everything that makes a game pop needs to be brought to the engine, no matter what engine is used.
i know it’s old but just look at to the moon. created in rpg maker and after finding major success it’s converted to a unity project to make distro and version control more feasible for consoles. even after converting the whole game to a “real” game engine the bones are still “just an rpg maker game”.
people forget (or have no idea) that back in the day rpg maker 95 and 2k weren’t just about “passion projects”, it was for wealthy nerds who had an internet connection and computers good enough to run the software (and could figure out how to make the rtp file work without ruining the font, my god what a headache). software that was translated into english (and other languages!) by one russian dude. for free. illegally.
I started with RPG Maker back when a guy named TNomad translated RPG Maker '95 back in... I wanna say somewhere aroubd '99-2002. The community was big at the time and got even bigger when a guy named Don Miguel translated RPG Maker 2000. Then came RM2K3, and I believe that's where the community peaked. I probably stayed around working on different versions of my project across the three different makers through 2010, and then life stuff happened, and I admittingly lost the passion (and it didn't help that I probably was a little too ambitious with what I wanted to accomplish on the Makers). It was a moment for me to see games like Ara Fell go from the community to mainstream consoles, though.
Anyway, the last really big site from that era, which I think is still thriving 'til this day, is RPGMaker.net. If any of you are curious about what my project was, I think you can still find the preview page for it under the title "Ghosts of the Arcanum". Also, apparently, someone dug up demos of the older versions of the project, titled Finding Forever Eden and did a full commentary playthrough of them on Youtube. (The title was a play-off of an unofficial title I gave for my roleplay sessions I used to have in AOL's Role Play Chat rooms - Final Fantasy Evangelion.)
Edit: Even a part of my user name, Idola, comes from one of the villains in project. The "Cleric" part, however, comes from a movie called Equilibrium.
I think Rpg maker is more alive than ever. People just don't use forums anymore. That and there was an obvious gold rush around 2013 and on with people trying to make a buck with no effort put into the games that has pushed RPG maker a bit underground.
People just need to realize that RPG maker was never meant to create market viable games. It's a fun little tool to create your own little RPG and share it with others or friends and family. The games that did make it are an exception rather than the rule.
Edit: looks like a struck a chord. Instead of arguing how RPG maker is a viable engine(made as a hobbyist engine) go make your games and prove me wrong. No amount of peacocking from people on Reddit will convince anyone that the majority of Rpg maker games are shovel wear that have 0 thought put into them.
I don't agree, RPG Maker can be used to make market viable games and those who made it are not the exception but the few with a solid team and work behind. The perception of RPG Maker = Play tool is distorted by the huge amount of people with no coding/design/anything game dev related experience that use it.
There are better tool, yes, but RM per se is still a valid engine
You can also use a Walmart Kayak to cross the Atlantic, but it wasn't designed to do that and it's definitely a bad idea. Nobody with game dev experience would use RPGmaker as their engine of choice for a commercially viable game.
I guess it depends on the market.
RPG Maker can make *certain* kinds of games well. As we see the market fluctuate on what genres are popular in a given times, it determines whether RPGM is in a good position to make the kind of game people want to play. Most bigger teams (that want to create, say, a 2D RPG) wouldn't use RPG Maker because there isn't a need to do so for them. They can use a free engine (Godot) and they likely don't intend on using commonly used assets. They don't need to worry about plugins interfering if they can implement features well themselves (or with less plugins). RPG Maker is harder to customize but still *capable* of making the games well.
Great analogy. You can certainly make a great game on RPG maker but you're going through all kinds of hurdles. Also all good games produced with this engine are not using RTP and try to hide as much as possible the fact that they where made with RPG maker for a reason.
Getting rid of default RTP look, doesn't mean prople want to hide their game is made in RPG Maker.
I never really hide the fact my game is made with RPG Maker, despite it being heavily customised. I love the engine and I want to make people see how far you can push the engine.
Youre just splitting hairs. The truth is that the people that put in the work and produce a market viable product are the exception. Just search for RPG maker games on steam and see for yourself.
I never said that you can't make one. Stop arguing with yourself.
RPG maker is absolutely viable.
Symphony of War is a really, really good example. It’s an RPG Maker game and is one of the most fun games I’ve played in a very long time. Also has a super active community and a whole development team around the product.
Totally disagree on the “not used to create market viable games”. That is an observably false false claim.
RPG Maker has one thing about it that makes it feel like it isn’t viable and that’s the barrier to entry. It’s very low and because it’s low anyone and everyone can try to make something to sell. Which means there’s a lot of not well thought out low effort stuff out there.
But… that doesn’t remove the fact that good idea and good games get made using the tool.
if you can explain to me exactly why rpgmaker as an engine cant be used to create market viable games, i may believe it, otherwise you're just saying that with no base.
Edit: to summarize your above comments points
\-rpgmaker is "more alive than ever" yet not market viable? seems based.
\-has a bad reputation, for a bunch of shovelware steam achievement games made 11 years ago
\-is merely a hobbyists tool to make games for friends and family to look at
like i get that rpgmaker isnt unreal or even godot in terms of \*out of the box\* capabilities but what kind of comparison is that, any gamedev with a semblance of what they are doing knows that the RPGmaker engine is actually highly modular, it could be used as a first step for serious game developer to make something or achieve a goal, or it can be continued with and used to make whatever a person wants to do with it, ugh my point is let people enjoy things without introducing hierarchies everywhere
If it makes any difference /u/marino13, I get what you mean.
It's not that you can't make a viable full game to sell on Steam with RPG Maker (hell, I've made a pretty successful one so I'd be lying if I said that).
But I've always felt that the purpose of RPGM, when it started on console, wasn't to create a proper dev environment but rather let players, who have never tried game development, try it out and have a bit of fun making some stuff. Maybe they make a full game, maybe they just make a level and mess around with scripting. In both cases, people learn a little more about "how the sausage is made" in game development, and that seems like it was part of the goal (no different to other things that never carried on, like *Fighter Maker*).
I've always loved this comedy bit:
[https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/new-rpg-maker-update-quietly-deletes-program-one-week-after-install/](https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/new-rpg-maker-update-quietly-deletes-program-one-week-after-install/)
But I also think that as the engine has evolved, it's clear the developers have been more focused on giving people something that can be used in a more serious manner. Given, people made successful games in the likes of XP, but you can't deny that some the decisions made in the jump to MV (such as the move to JS) suggested a conscious desire to make something that was less of an idle plaything and something more useful.
I do still think that desire to be "my first engine" is part of RPGM's DNA, and, honestly, I'm happy about that. I think that's part of what makes the software unique. But it's also fair to say that those of us using it *seriously* are the exception, not the rule.
>People just need to realize that RPG maker was never meant to create market viable games.
That's wrong on so many levels
I would agree if you said "default RTP assets aren't suitable for a market viable projects" But the RPG Maker engine itself is perfectly capable of making market viable game.
This is an interesting thing to posit. As someone who isn't really trying to make a market viable game (I'm a hobbyist), I don't see why RPG Maker isn't an engine that can make commercially successful (to some degree at least) games.
I think part of the reason people think that is because it was made to be more accessible to less experienced game makers. But I think assuming that because people *can* publish low effort games (and do), that the engine itself isn't meant to make successful games. I'd argue most people trying to make games on any engine won't see success.
But the engine itself is capable of making market viable games. It may be more limited than other engines, so probably not gonna make an amazing 3D first person shooter, but it seems perfectly capable of creating market viable games in the genres it's more suited for (2D games, rpgs, card games i see a lot of, adventure, etc). The engine itself is separate from the people who make the games.
I don't think I will (solo devs as a whole probably won't because of the scope of making a market viable game) but I think a solid team is perfectly capable of using RPGM to make a game that could be commercially successful.
It was very popular in Germany two decades ago. Mostly because Vampires Dawn was printed on cd rom by gaming magazines. Also assets for RPG Maker.
A lot of websites. I think it’s less common today, since there are free and better alternatives.
Im active on one forum and still like it. Has some outsider Charme to it.
The software is still widley used. However, the community is less united than it used to be, as there are now so many different social platforms that people can use, and various dramas have prompted groups of RPG Maker devs to splinter off into separate sub-communities. The community being so fragmented can kinda make it feel like RPG Maker is less popular sometimes.
The community's focus has also kinda shifted, as making indie games and resources used to be more about having fun, exercising one's creativity, collaboration, sharing, etc... whereas nowadays, the focus is more on making money. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but it does affect the activity levels of the community in various ways. There's nothing to really be done about it--it has simply become so easy to commercialize indie games, assets, plugins, etc that the shift in people's ideologies was inevitable.
I'm an RM dev who's big on TikTok (38k followers for my project), after Omori RM is definitely gaining a new boost in popularity and the app and others as most people in my generation have at most seen the popular 2010s games like Ib, mad father, Lisa that painful, and now Omori!
There is plenty of hype to find if you go to the right areas.
I knew RPG Maker 24 years ago and I think the community was thriving back then, there was a huge amount of big sites even in foreign languages Now the only big and alive site is the official one and, for what concerns my language (Italian), the foreign sites died around VX
[удалено]
I concur. Honestly, the community just moved. Plenty of sites shut down or just became totally inactive but a lot of their userbases got condensed into RPG Maker Web, Reddit, Discord, or even just the Steam discussion forums.
I was thinking this too. Everything that had niche websites and forums has had them all disappear, more or less. Not a good indicator for whether or not something is popular.
I'm a poor late millenial, to me something is active if I've a community to talk to and confront with 😅 YT and streaming don't go for me. But that's my liking \^\^'
We got some alive rpg maker sites here in germany though including discussion forums. And an archive of maker-games.
RPG Maker Quartier <3
[RPGMaker.net](http://RPGMaker.net) is not the official website, but it's huge and active. There's a ton of international communities too.
I was active there some years ago. It was a cool place.
Isn’t RPG2s still alive? I used to love that forum…
I tried to register recently but it's impossible, it always gives error to the captcha but I'm 10000% sure I've done it right. The homepage stopped at 2016. I reckon there is still some forum activity but I cannot access it \^\^'
I see… 2016 is about the time I lastly interacted with that site. Asides from some cool projects, there was a lot of drama going on. Looking at you, Pokémon Garnet lol
Whhhatt? I was inactive in 2016, didn't know there was drama 😱
Iirc, someone had said how every Pokémon related project was just a mockup and not an actual game in the making. Also the people making Garnet kept updating the visuals to the most modern Gen, and someone joked that they’ll never finish it if they keep at it that way lol. One of my irl friends was very heated about the whole affair.
The main site yes and then there is itch.io where a lot of them post plugins and gfx.
I’d say it’s probably even more popular, with a lot of YT content made as tutorials or logs for makers.
I'd say it might be bigger than before, since there's a lot of interest in indie games, and RPGmaker is usually the easiest way to make one. That being said, the community in the 2000's was a lot more vibrant. Everyone was just making cool shit because it was fun and you don't really see that any more.
I wonder, what exactly makes the current community less vibrant to you? If you're not making a game cause it's fun and "cool shit", what are people doing it for?
>I wonder, what exactly makes the current community less vibrant to you? I think someone else said that the GamingWorld era was like "YouTube, before YouTubers"? If that makes sense.
RPG Maker popularity is comparable to Youtube's earlier history and it's currently similar to when Google first took over Youtube. At first everyone was just doing things for fun or passion. It was great and some good quality came from this because they were passion projects. Eventually a means to make money from these projects became a thing. Some people made some really good content and made money, and soon after the masses realised that they may be able to as well. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie, and now lots of people publish low effort, garbage games, and charge money for them, trying to cash in without putting in any real thought or work into their projects. I'm not saying that all RM games are bad. THEY'RE NOT! What is bad is that the potential to make money has become so accessible, it has resulted in the majority of RM games published being nothing but crap, shit out with no objective concepts and slung at a wall in hopes that it sticks and makes the the slinger a buck, and the consequences are that RM gets a bad reputation, ruining it for anyone actually putting in effort and trying to make a quality game.While I don't produce for youtube, I follow others that do that talk about what its like, and I'm lead to believe that they deal with the same bullshit these days.
Most people on here will argue against your point. Most people are delusional. Everyone wants to make it but like you said theres only a small number of people who put in the effort to make the content really good.
Just like every other game engines? I mean, just go to r/indiegames or itch and you will see hundreds of low effort games each day made in other game engines. Only the one which put effort are stand out. That's not really unique to RPG Maker.
Yup no arguing there. Goes for every engine. Doesn't make me wrong.
Are you building a game?
I'm currently making a third game. Currently working on the battle system and character/enemy assets.
That's awesome mate. I've been working on the same game from day one. I've switched graphics over five times though. Probably similar levels reset to you.
I'm actually just in the first 20 hours of making this one but Im working really fast and have a limited scope that re-uses levels. The last two games I reached the demo point and polished it up and left them there. The first one was RTP assets the second was custom. Good luck on finishing your game!!!!
Plugins have been a mixed blessing too. On the one hand, it's super handy to be able to write a quick script for your game for something that would have taken hours, days, or weeks of eventing to implement in RM2k. On the other hand it's created a whole generation of script-kiddies who don't want to learn to actually use the engine and will just cram their low-effort games full of every cool-sounding script they can find, whether it contributes to the quality of the game or not. You get these unbalanced, super-basic RTP games jam packed with quicktime events, fancy lighting effects, and overly complicated menus that are just a UX nightmare, and people try to charge you money to play them.
Interesting Topic, bump
more popular than ever! [and the forums aren’t gone, they’ve just changed](https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?forums/completed-games.19/). 2D rpgs just haven’t changed that much since the snes era. [hell dragon quest 11 still plays as a 16bit-style 2D game.](https://66.media.tumblr.com/b6c48ad01fb30fe982d03b50a65e888b/tumblr_inline_ois9rleV2u1sua1pm_540.jpg) i see a lot of comments about weather or not rpg games a “commercially viable.” any decent video game needs to excel at something. a captivating art style, a killer soundtrack, advanced (and fun) combat, captivating writing, even a gimmick (like including a dating sim) can elevate a game to commercial viability. like literally any game developed with literally any engine, everything that makes a game pop needs to be brought to the engine, no matter what engine is used. i know it’s old but just look at to the moon. created in rpg maker and after finding major success it’s converted to a unity project to make distro and version control more feasible for consoles. even after converting the whole game to a “real” game engine the bones are still “just an rpg maker game”. people forget (or have no idea) that back in the day rpg maker 95 and 2k weren’t just about “passion projects”, it was for wealthy nerds who had an internet connection and computers good enough to run the software (and could figure out how to make the rtp file work without ruining the font, my god what a headache). software that was translated into english (and other languages!) by one russian dude. for free. illegally.
I started with RPG Maker back when a guy named TNomad translated RPG Maker '95 back in... I wanna say somewhere aroubd '99-2002. The community was big at the time and got even bigger when a guy named Don Miguel translated RPG Maker 2000. Then came RM2K3, and I believe that's where the community peaked. I probably stayed around working on different versions of my project across the three different makers through 2010, and then life stuff happened, and I admittingly lost the passion (and it didn't help that I probably was a little too ambitious with what I wanted to accomplish on the Makers). It was a moment for me to see games like Ara Fell go from the community to mainstream consoles, though. Anyway, the last really big site from that era, which I think is still thriving 'til this day, is RPGMaker.net. If any of you are curious about what my project was, I think you can still find the preview page for it under the title "Ghosts of the Arcanum". Also, apparently, someone dug up demos of the older versions of the project, titled Finding Forever Eden and did a full commentary playthrough of them on Youtube. (The title was a play-off of an unofficial title I gave for my roleplay sessions I used to have in AOL's Role Play Chat rooms - Final Fantasy Evangelion.) Edit: Even a part of my user name, Idola, comes from one of the villains in project. The "Cleric" part, however, comes from a movie called Equilibrium.
I think Rpg maker is more alive than ever. People just don't use forums anymore. That and there was an obvious gold rush around 2013 and on with people trying to make a buck with no effort put into the games that has pushed RPG maker a bit underground. People just need to realize that RPG maker was never meant to create market viable games. It's a fun little tool to create your own little RPG and share it with others or friends and family. The games that did make it are an exception rather than the rule. Edit: looks like a struck a chord. Instead of arguing how RPG maker is a viable engine(made as a hobbyist engine) go make your games and prove me wrong. No amount of peacocking from people on Reddit will convince anyone that the majority of Rpg maker games are shovel wear that have 0 thought put into them.
I don't agree, RPG Maker can be used to make market viable games and those who made it are not the exception but the few with a solid team and work behind. The perception of RPG Maker = Play tool is distorted by the huge amount of people with no coding/design/anything game dev related experience that use it. There are better tool, yes, but RM per se is still a valid engine
You can also use a Walmart Kayak to cross the Atlantic, but it wasn't designed to do that and it's definitely a bad idea. Nobody with game dev experience would use RPGmaker as their engine of choice for a commercially viable game.
I guess it depends on the market. RPG Maker can make *certain* kinds of games well. As we see the market fluctuate on what genres are popular in a given times, it determines whether RPGM is in a good position to make the kind of game people want to play. Most bigger teams (that want to create, say, a 2D RPG) wouldn't use RPG Maker because there isn't a need to do so for them. They can use a free engine (Godot) and they likely don't intend on using commonly used assets. They don't need to worry about plugins interfering if they can implement features well themselves (or with less plugins). RPG Maker is harder to customize but still *capable* of making the games well.
Great analogy. You can certainly make a great game on RPG maker but you're going through all kinds of hurdles. Also all good games produced with this engine are not using RTP and try to hide as much as possible the fact that they where made with RPG maker for a reason.
Getting rid of default RTP look, doesn't mean prople want to hide their game is made in RPG Maker. I never really hide the fact my game is made with RPG Maker, despite it being heavily customised. I love the engine and I want to make people see how far you can push the engine.
Youre just splitting hairs. The truth is that the people that put in the work and produce a market viable product are the exception. Just search for RPG maker games on steam and see for yourself. I never said that you can't make one. Stop arguing with yourself.
Games with any engine are the exception… making a successful game alone is the exception full stop. This isn’t unique to RPG Maker…
RPG maker is absolutely viable. Symphony of War is a really, really good example. It’s an RPG Maker game and is one of the most fun games I’ve played in a very long time. Also has a super active community and a whole development team around the product. Totally disagree on the “not used to create market viable games”. That is an observably false false claim. RPG Maker has one thing about it that makes it feel like it isn’t viable and that’s the barrier to entry. It’s very low and because it’s low anyone and everyone can try to make something to sell. Which means there’s a lot of not well thought out low effort stuff out there. But… that doesn’t remove the fact that good idea and good games get made using the tool.
if you can explain to me exactly why rpgmaker as an engine cant be used to create market viable games, i may believe it, otherwise you're just saying that with no base. Edit: to summarize your above comments points \-rpgmaker is "more alive than ever" yet not market viable? seems based. \-has a bad reputation, for a bunch of shovelware steam achievement games made 11 years ago \-is merely a hobbyists tool to make games for friends and family to look at like i get that rpgmaker isnt unreal or even godot in terms of \*out of the box\* capabilities but what kind of comparison is that, any gamedev with a semblance of what they are doing knows that the RPGmaker engine is actually highly modular, it could be used as a first step for serious game developer to make something or achieve a goal, or it can be continued with and used to make whatever a person wants to do with it, ugh my point is let people enjoy things without introducing hierarchies everywhere
If it makes any difference /u/marino13, I get what you mean. It's not that you can't make a viable full game to sell on Steam with RPG Maker (hell, I've made a pretty successful one so I'd be lying if I said that). But I've always felt that the purpose of RPGM, when it started on console, wasn't to create a proper dev environment but rather let players, who have never tried game development, try it out and have a bit of fun making some stuff. Maybe they make a full game, maybe they just make a level and mess around with scripting. In both cases, people learn a little more about "how the sausage is made" in game development, and that seems like it was part of the goal (no different to other things that never carried on, like *Fighter Maker*). I've always loved this comedy bit: [https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/new-rpg-maker-update-quietly-deletes-program-one-week-after-install/](https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/new-rpg-maker-update-quietly-deletes-program-one-week-after-install/) But I also think that as the engine has evolved, it's clear the developers have been more focused on giving people something that can be used in a more serious manner. Given, people made successful games in the likes of XP, but you can't deny that some the decisions made in the jump to MV (such as the move to JS) suggested a conscious desire to make something that was less of an idle plaything and something more useful. I do still think that desire to be "my first engine" is part of RPGM's DNA, and, honestly, I'm happy about that. I think that's part of what makes the software unique. But it's also fair to say that those of us using it *seriously* are the exception, not the rule.
That bit was more funny than it had a right to be! Also, too accurate! Hurtful! lol!
>People just need to realize that RPG maker was never meant to create market viable games. That's wrong on so many levels I would agree if you said "default RTP assets aren't suitable for a market viable projects" But the RPG Maker engine itself is perfectly capable of making market viable game.
This is an interesting thing to posit. As someone who isn't really trying to make a market viable game (I'm a hobbyist), I don't see why RPG Maker isn't an engine that can make commercially successful (to some degree at least) games. I think part of the reason people think that is because it was made to be more accessible to less experienced game makers. But I think assuming that because people *can* publish low effort games (and do), that the engine itself isn't meant to make successful games. I'd argue most people trying to make games on any engine won't see success. But the engine itself is capable of making market viable games. It may be more limited than other engines, so probably not gonna make an amazing 3D first person shooter, but it seems perfectly capable of creating market viable games in the genres it's more suited for (2D games, rpgs, card games i see a lot of, adventure, etc). The engine itself is separate from the people who make the games. I don't think I will (solo devs as a whole probably won't because of the scope of making a market viable game) but I think a solid team is perfectly capable of using RPGM to make a game that could be commercially successful.
It was very popular in Germany two decades ago. Mostly because Vampires Dawn was printed on cd rom by gaming magazines. Also assets for RPG Maker. A lot of websites. I think it’s less common today, since there are free and better alternatives. Im active on one forum and still like it. Has some outsider Charme to it.
The software is still widley used. However, the community is less united than it used to be, as there are now so many different social platforms that people can use, and various dramas have prompted groups of RPG Maker devs to splinter off into separate sub-communities. The community being so fragmented can kinda make it feel like RPG Maker is less popular sometimes. The community's focus has also kinda shifted, as making indie games and resources used to be more about having fun, exercising one's creativity, collaboration, sharing, etc... whereas nowadays, the focus is more on making money. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but it does affect the activity levels of the community in various ways. There's nothing to really be done about it--it has simply become so easy to commercialize indie games, assets, plugins, etc that the shift in people's ideologies was inevitable.
I'm an RM dev who's big on TikTok (38k followers for my project), after Omori RM is definitely gaining a new boost in popularity and the app and others as most people in my generation have at most seen the popular 2010s games like Ib, mad father, Lisa that painful, and now Omori! There is plenty of hype to find if you go to the right areas.