When Steam put curation in the hands of the community, it really opened opened up the floodgates for a lot of weird, cool indie games. It also opened up the space for a lot of weird, bad indie games! In the former camp, you have FIve Nights at Freddy’s. In the latter, there’s Five Nights at Freddy’s World.
First, it came out! Then, it turned out to be bad. Then, the developer pulled it from Steam and gave everyone an infinite refund window! Now it lives again in updated form for free. Game Jolt hosts some very small-scale indie projects. Think less indie, and more your brother’s garage band. FNaFW is now, in fact, among thousands of Freddy’s fangames.
Hey, I fiddled around with Gamemaker just long enough to tell you that making games is hard. The shocking success of FNaF led to an instant desire for more, and Scott Cawthon, the sole developer behind the games did his best to fill that demand. He deemed World a failure and made it up to the community as best he could. Transparency when broken releases is something we could stand to see a lot more of from all over the industry.
