Five Nights at Freddy’s World flees from Steam — and criticism

The latest entry in the Five Nights at Freddy’s universe is no longer on Steam.

Developer Scott Cawthon has removed his Five Nights at Freddy’s World role-playing game from the Valve’s digital-distribution platform. This is a spinoff of the demonic horror Five Nights at Freddy’s games. The developer announced that he is taking World down in a post on Steam, where he explained that he is not happy with the response from fans. In reviews on Steam, gamers complained that World was missing basic functions like a stats page for the characters and a way to find out what attacks and abilities do in battle. The Five Nights creator is now working with Valve to enable anyone who wants a refund to get it regardless of how long they’ve played it. Of course, you can keep the game if you want, and Valve will not remove it from your Steam library.

While this is the end of FNAF World making money on Steam, Cawthon is not going to bury the game.

“I’m still going to work on FNAF World and polish it up,” he wrote. “I’m busy creating a fully 3D overworld for the game. When I’m ready to update the game, I will replace the demo currently on GameJolt with the full game. From this point forward, the game will always be free.”

Cawthon has built something of an empire out of his weird, low-fi Five Nights games. Since 2014, he has made four Five Nights at Freddy’s games, where players must survive as a security guard in a Chuck E. Cheese’s-like pizza restaurant … where the animatronic animals come to life to murder.

The games have found a huge amount of financial success thanks in large part to gaining traction with the YouTube community. Players will record themselves playing the game and screaming dramatically, and this has helped Five Nights and Cawthon build up a young cult following.