Major romhack website Romhacking.net is winding down its operations effective immediately. It will shift to a read-only format, and further submissions - aside from news - will now be closed.
Romhacking.net has been running for almost 20 years and has, until now, provided a place to share romhacks and game translations. There have been new submissions as recent as yesterday for everything from Pokemon Emerald to Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade and Suikoden, but in a new statement by the site's founder, Nightcrawler, it's confirmed that "for various reasons it's time to wind things down."
Nightcrawler says that Romhacking.net "achieved almost everything it set out to do, and far exceeded it," transforming ROM hacking from something that was once "niche and fragmented to global and centralized," all while making it "much more accepted by the mainstream." With that, of course, came an increased level of popularity, which in this case was a double-edged sword.
"Copyright pressures increased dramatically with takedowns and legal burden," Nightcrawler says. "The site shifted from serving mostly contributing humans to bots and overzealous people abusing resources. They drowned everybody else out. The need for the site has lessened over time. There are now many options for community discussions, open source projects, and file storage across the internet."
With that in mind, Nightcrawler began "looking to wind things down at the end of last year," but an unnamed group apparently offered help to keep things going. However, Nightcrawler alleges that their personal details were shared, and "secret deceitful plots had been made to cut me out."
Nightcrawler says "we are immediately ceasing all related site operations," with images and downloads "available for as long as DarkSol, FCAndChill Calico will allow." The site's forum will remain available, but Discord and Twitter affiliations have ended. While "all sections" of the website will stay available as read-only, its database has also been submitted to Internet Archive for preservation.
It's truly the end of an era for the classic site, and the impact is being felt by users already. "Absolute shame. This was THE best way to follow fan translations for JP-only releases from previous console generations," one Reddit user writes, responding to the news. "This is super sad, I played many obscure old [JRPGs] thanks to the ROM hacking community," comments another.
"No doubt, this site changed ROM hacking forever," Nightcrawler writes. "It will leave behind the legacy of those accomplishments to remember."
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