Just wanted to get the opinions of the community about making commercial games with RPG Maker.

Don't you will embarrass yourself plus read the license as you may be breaking the law as well

As someone with absolutely no experience coding with RPG Maker, I have to say...why not? As long as the game's good—and I'm not sure we can assume that every game made with RPG Maker is necessarily of a low quality—I'd be willing to pay $$$ for it. In fact, I bet a lot of people would.

The key to selling games made wit this, is having one heck of a good artist to make character portraits & sprites. and a professional author ( or avid D&D dungeon master ).

I have played around with RPG Maker in the past, and I must say that this game creation system is outdated. True some folks will buy old style RPGs, but as a whole the market for this, is over saturated with so-so games.
If you want to try sell games made this way, I would suggest having a demo with one heck of a story to it.

If you wisht to try your hand at creating 2D RPGs with out paying $$ for it, here is a free 2D MMORPG maker to get a feel for it http://mmorpgmaker.org (( I have used this as well ))

Or you could try Game Maker from Yoyogames. Its another option and one that's well known and used by many.

Don't you will embarrass yourself

Why are you assuming it would be embarrassing to publish a game made with RPG maker? I think this falls under the second category from my list of 4 reasons you aren't a successful indie developer: "You think it matters that you're using 'real' languages and 'real' tools". Assuming the OP made a good quality game using RPG Maker, and was able to distribute it in a sensible way that didn't bother the end-user with weird install issues or the like, there's absolutely no reason the game couldn't be successful and popular -- as long as it doesn't affect their game play, players simply don't care how a game was made, as shown by Paul's example of a successful game made with RPG Maker.

Your advice to check the licence was a good idea -- but from a quick look it seems there's absolutely no reason you can't sell an RPG Maker game, assuming you don't do anything silly like importing copyrighted graphics from another game.



While we're listing possible alternatives, you could also consider Scirra's Construct 2.

Didn't one of GD's own major contests get won by a GameMaker game one year?

Ninja <3 Pirate I think it was.

I love that article jbadams, huge insight into some pitfalls to avoid!

From the wiki about To The Moon that was posted above, it sounds like there has been some success with using RPG Maker in the past, if done right. So I wouldn't be too discouraged about the outlook of this type of game.