Five Nights at Freddy's, a cultural gaming giant big enough to have its own movie (that was apparently Just Okay, according to critics) has come to Roblox—wait, hold on a second, it's gone. Now it's in beta? Oh, but the beta's been "taken down for a few weeks." Err.
The whole thing was a comic misunderstanding according to the series' creator Scott Cawthon (thanks, IGN) who is otherwise retired after significant donations to right-wing parties brought him under fire from LGBTQ+ members of his fanbase. In a response on the game's subreddit, Cawthon writes:
Best I can tell from the footage of this thing, Five Nights at Freddy's: Survival Crew appears to have been a Dead by Daylight-style multiplayer game where Roblox characters try to avoid the Fazbear himself. Only, it's severely under-polished—here's a good example, courtesy of Twitter user and FNAF YouTuber PlainTrace.
new fnaf roblox game goes hard pic.twitter.com/igBBkY0I4IDecember 20, 2023
Despite this, the game's developers put a big BETA stamp on it, and appear to be treating Yono all app the whole thing as a test. The game itself is being developed by Metaverse Team Frights. There's a Discord server, but you can't chat in it—because, as players observed, it devolved into complete NSFW anarchy. I've have a couple of examples here courtesy of Calad.
The second image here includes straight-up pornography and erotica, so I've taken the liberty of censoring it with some black bars and my Baldur's Gate 3 character.
With the caution of someone stepping onto a minefield, I decided to poke my head in to see if the anarchy was still ongoing, and was met with this: first, an insistence that the game was a beta rather than an accidental release, in direct contradiction to Cawthon's words. Second, an announcement that the game would be disabled "until [it] comes back for beta."
Every single channel has been scrubbed clean. There's even an initial announcement from December 18 that still shows two "#Unknown" channel links. I feel like I've just sleepwalked into a hidden government base somewhere and found a bunch of files blotted out with black REDACTED ink. How the Five Nights at Freddy's: Survival Crew situation develops from here will be interesting to say the least, if this cursed object even comes out at all.
