‘Five Nights at Freddy’s VR’ Creator Apologizes After Stealing Fan-Made Designs

Scott Cawthon, the creator of Five Nights at Freddy’s, is in some hot water after debuting a new set of images showing off the game’s VR experience with stolen artwork from fans.

The new teaser images showed up on the game’s official website a few days ago, but have since been removed after the immediate fan backlash. Apparently the models used in the recent teasers were fan-made, including the one seen below:

The video at the top of the article also dives deeper into this as well, though the creator did immediately remove them and issued the below apology:

“As you all remember, the artwork that I’d teased for the game (which was actually a portion of the cover artwork), included characters that had used fan art and fan models as references. When I learned about that, I was obviously pretty upset and took down the teaser. I’ve been speaking with the team over at Steel Wool (the VR company) for the last few days, working through this, and figuring out from them what happened. Based on what I’ve heard, I do believe that it was an isolated incident and that it wasn’t done with bad intentions. The person working on the artwork used images that he thought were mine. If anything, everyone who had one of their models referenced should pat themselves on the back because your models looked like they were canon! I think it’s a testament to the fan community that the fan models rival mine, many of them look identical, and some of them look BETTER!”

He then added as an addendum that the fan-art models were based off of his own, though he mentioned that this doesn’t “excuse” the use of someone else’s materials.

He added, “I wholeheartedly believe that it wasn’t anyone’s intent to steal or copy any else’s work. Trust me when I say that the people over at Steel Wool have been working their butts off on this game, trying to make it something incredible, and something that will be an excellent addition to the series. I’ve been consistently impressed with the work they’ve done. There are sections where you repair Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy, and those sections are terrifying. You are instructed to reach inside of their chest cavities, or pull their faces off, or pull their eyeballs out(!), it’s really unnerving.”

You can read the full statement here over on his post on Reddit, but for now it looks like the images themselves have been taken down and the team is putting together another round of teasers — this time with their own materials.

Thoughts on the Five Nights at Freddy’s debacle? Honest mistake, or should they have known better? Sound off in the comment section below, or hit me up over on Twitter @DirtyEffinHippy.

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