openrct2.org and openrct2.io have merged

For years, there have been two websites that acted as the OpenRCT2 website: openrct2.org (ran by community member GingerAdonis) and openrct2.io (the official one). This often led to confusion.

When the OpenRCT2 project went public in early 2014, it had not much presence besides the GitHub repository. It also didn’t offer binaries, you had to compile the game yourself. GingerAdonis saw this and decided to set up a website and build server in order to plug this gap. He also added a quickstart guide and later also added the forums, so that people could get help more easily. This has helped the game along tremendously.

In 2016, we did get around to setting up our own official website, but at the time it was quite a limited affair, only offering release builds and a link to openrct2.org for the development builds. As such, openrct2.org continued to play an important role, to the point that it was very often mistaken for the official one.

Fast forward eight years, and the situation has changed. We improved both our documentation and our website. We introduced Continuous Integration, which not only ensures that our code actually runs on all the platforms, but also provides builds, making the separate build server unnecessary. And we now have communities on Discord, GitHub Discussions and Reddit where people can find help if they have problems.

Meanwhile, the openrct2.org site has mostly remained as-is, and the forums have been underutilised for a few years, with most people now seeking help on one of the other platforms. As such, we proposed merging the two websites, to which he agreed. All URLs to the openrct2.org site now redirect to their counterparts on openrct2.io. The forums will be made read-only from the 1st of January 2025 and will continue to be available for the time being.

We hope this move will help clear up things for our users. It will also make things easier for us, as we can now much more easily apply changes or fixes to our website.

We would like to thank GingerAdonis for setting up his site and continuing to run - and fund! - it for more than 10 years.

On behalf of the OpenRCT2 team,
~Gymnasiast