Wednesday, September 6, 2017

The surprising explosion of RPG Maker on Steam - [PC Gamer]




(from PC Gamer by Matt Sayer - April 12th, 2017)

"Can a game engine as old as the Super Nintendo remain relevant in 2017? If we're talking about RPG Maker, the answer is a resounding yes. After two decades of relative obscurity, the game-making software has exploded in popularity in recent years, leading to gems like To The Moon, LISA, and Always Sometimes Monsters. Since its first release in the early '90s, RPG Maker has mostly avoided mainstream attention, trundling along as a hobbyist tool for hardcore 16-bit JRPG fans. It wasn't until 2007 that the community even established a central repository for sharing advice and distributing their games. Dubbed the RPG Maker Network, it hosted more than 50 games in 2008, and another 74 in 2009. Many of these games were tech demos and proofs-of-concept, small projects made more for the developer's sake than for the player's. Others were fan games, lifting sprites and lore from established properties. Almost no one was selling their games.

All that changed in 2013..."

Via PC Gamer

( I apologize for the lack of updates, currently tied up with other responsibilities - I don't normally post news stories like this, but I thought this was a interesting overview of what rpgmaker means in 2017)