Glad to see the community picking up the banner for the game engine. I personally was never a BGE user and have advocated for the removal of the category here, but I certainly donāt think that collective record of peopleās passion should just be erased and kicked to the curb.
Thanks @rafael13 for holding space for the BGE / UPBGE / Range community in a venue that will be a better fit going forward. and Thanks @joseph for facilitating the transition graciously.
Glad to hear that rafael13 came up to help and rescue the heritage (remember reading once that they also have difficult costs).
Migrating to another kind of forum other than discourse might be trickier from what I read in a short search.
Still finding it a bit sad that this cool place will loose its true home. Because of 30-40GB server space.
Sadly Iām not in the financial position to be able to pay this.
You personally donāt need to be in the financial position. If the 14 people that have engaged with this post each joined Patreon with a $2.50 a month membership, that would be $35 a month. That would help significantly. If we can get 14 more Patreon members (not counting one time signups that immediately cancel, 14 people or more in for the long haul) before September 1st, that would very much change things
Actually, Iām going to be even more direct. If we can get 20 new patreon memberships, I will personally and officially cancel this sunsetting and leave the category open. I think if there arenāt 20 members of the game agent community that want to step up here, that will be a good indicator that the community is small, dwindling, and would make the decision to sunset this category the logical choice
Where is the link to support the game engine category?
Somehow i forgot tho post this even when editing this ~4days ago.. 
If.. and only if.. there are some more supporters (Patreon) from the āgame domainā.. then this may not be needed.. (??)..
The numbers of patreons may have risen a bit, but it seems not very much users wondered why BlenderArtist was down for some time.. and the transfer not only took timeā¦ 
FAQ: How do you pay the bills.
Also this is announcement:
was not speaking of deletion yet. So it also may lead to some discusion so that there might be a solution. (?)
On the other hand there are questions if some blender game engine fork is dead alreadyā¦
But also (very game active) BA-users tried something..
..and so someone knows how difficult this can be.
Even if there (was) is a discord server.. (but no news from this here lately)
Somekind of off-topic:
Sadly it seems some āusersā rather pay for AI instead of supporting ātheirā community ?? ( And it feels weird when talking to people who contanstly tell you that ātheirā AI have told themā¦ 
)
And using some free service might be tempting, but you do have no control about the content then, see:
So.. this could āevaporateā some other day. ..nothing is really free.
Finally there seems to be a solution for this.. by supporting BA more .
I am now a 25 dollar patron.
Forty gigabytes sounds significant, but to put things in perspective, how much space does BlenderArtists take up in total? Whatās the average increase in size per month?
Then, are measures like these necessary from time to time? Have other categories been set to āread-onlyā, then removed from the site before?
Thanks in advance for your time and answers!
Forty GB is a mid-range estimate, itās somewhere between 30-70. But thatās not the sole motivation behind this decision, the motivation is as follows:
The game engine section of this website has continually declined in engagement, content, and activity. The game engine is no longer relevant to this site, and we are using large amounts of storage space to host the files from that section of the forum.
Emphasis mine. The Game Engine category has seen more activity in the last week than in the last 3 months previously, due to this announcement. Iām happy to see a rallying of community happening here, but a week surge of activity isnāt enough reason to keep a largely dead section active. People arenāt using the Game Engine category. If that is changing, if this week is a sign of life coming back, that changes things. But if not, the storage is irrelevant, if no one is using a section, itās not adding anything to the site or community.
When I said:
I think if there arenāt 20 members of the game agent community that want to step up here, that will be a good indicator that the community is small, dwindling, and would make the decision to sunset this category the logical choice
I mean specifically that 20 new Patreon subscribers would show that people are using and care about this section. Thatās not in any way evident based on historical data. Again, if this week is a sign of things changing, thatās awesome, but I canāt overlook the steep decline into non-activity here unless change is meaningful and lasting.
Dead forum sections are bad for any community; as links rot away and questions go unanswered, it shows new users and search engines that this site is dying. The higher the % of unanswered questions, the lower we drop in SEO regards. Link rot is also bad for SEO.
A dead forum section drags the whole forum down with it eventually.
Let me put it differently- in the past year, before this announcement, the sum total of posts in Game Engine or subcategories was 240. Up to today, itās 280. 30/40 of those come from this topic. That means that this topic is contributing 10.7% of the total activity for the entire section over the last year. Thatās not even new topics, thatās topics and replies. If we look at new topics, thereās 45 for the last year. Thatās simply not what a thriving, healthy, or even active community looks like
I avoided the game engine category thinking it was only meant for game engines tightly connected to Blender.
Just joined the patreon. Will you know that the new contributors are there for the game engine?
So far, all two of them have told me so, so yes
yeah, be nice if there is some plan of preserving this part of the forum. if space is the problem, why not just limit or disable file or video uploads to save space on the game engine section so people wonāt abuse the system.
I have been reasonably clear that space is not that problem, I think. But Iāll repeat myself just so it doesnāt get lost in the shuffle:
In other words, despite the rallying of community around this topic, none of you are actually using this section in a meaningful way. Itās basically dead, in terms of activity, engagement, and content. There is a definite up-tick over the last week in general activity in this section, which is awesome. If that continues, that changes things
Donāt be inflammatory. Joseph has real, justifiable reasoning and is being very gracious and transparent. He could have instantly deleted everything and still be in the right.
BGE is not a part of blender anymore. Would it make sense to have a radiosity category? I really liked the radiosity engine, and sure, they removed it 20 years ago, but I liked it so it should stay. Does that make sense? No. They removed it 20 years ago, and it is no longer a viable tool for the blender artists of today.
I get that there is a handful of users that still cling to the BGE, but it is well and truly not coming back to blender in an official capacity. It does not make sense for us to hold space for abandoned legacy features. If there were a smaller, more focused community of users that are 100% behind the BGE and its fledgling spinoffs, it would be better for all people involved.
Two things: one, as Iāve said, we need to see more activity. Patreon members are a form of activity, not the only form. Two, Iāve been incredibly clear that deletion will only happen far in the future after everything has been safely migrated somewhere else. I get that youāre upset, but itās not helping your cause to cherry-pick what has been said here
@joseph I Just wanted to thank you for offering to keep the BGE category open. And I completely understand the reason to close it. as much as we like using bge and the forks, the truth is that it is slowly disappearing as the years go on. most of the teams working on the forks struggle to keep enough revenue to justify working on them, so meaningful updates have halted for the most part. there are sill some that still put in a ton of effort, but without enough resources to keep experienced backend devs going im afraid the little bit of soul bge has left will fade back into obscurity. In any case I will respect what ever decision is made.
Thanks 
FWIW, if Iām wrong about the activity level of this section, that would be the best case scenario. I would love to see this come back to life. So far, thatās not playing out.
There have been six new topics since I made this one, three of them from the same person that really should be combined into one. Over 70% of the total replies to all topics in this category since the initial post here are to this thread. There are four new Patreon subscribers, which is very much appreciated and helps immensely, but itās also nowhere near 20.
When September 1st comes around, I will, with the other staff, do a comprehensive and detailed audit of activity, content, and engagement. We will look at topics, posts, page views, page views by logged in users, posts per user, user signups, unique users per topic, new user retention, daily active users, monthly active users, and every other metric available. We will evaluate August against other months this year, against other historical Augusts, against high points and low points for activity.
Utimately, we will make a data-driven decision that boils down to one question: can August show the kind of activity that gets this section out of a years-long downward slope of constantly decreasing record lows? If so, we will pause this plan for a while and reevaluate. If not, closing this section is the only possible choice that makes sense
