Draft:Scott Cawthon

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Actually, it's about ethics in ... Video games

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Scott Braden Cawthon is an indie game developer, 3D animator, writer and producer best known for creating the Five Nights at Freddy's series. A major indie-horror franchise starting with the self-titled 2014 PC Game. The series fan-base is known for very complicated lore-based discussions and especially in the past was known as a "Toxic Fanbase". Cawthon has defended the FNaF fanbase against said accusations and in 2020 Cawthon announced the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative to help fund and publish notable FNaF fan-games.

Scott has been active in video games since the mid 1990's with his first game being released in 1994. Many of his games before Five Nights At Freddy's tended to be oriented around Christianity and Biblical stories aimed at a broader demographic. Although one game of note that was darker in tone and of note before FNaF was 2012's The Desolate Hope, a top-down RPG with industrial and surrealist elements where you played as a sentient robotic coffee machine. The game was rediscovered after his later success and was speculated to have had an anti-abortion theme, but Scott himself denied the game had anything to do with abortion.

In 2013 Scott submitted his game Chipper & Sons Lumber Co. to Steam Greenlight. It was a family friendly management/simulation title starring an anthropomorphic beaver, however reviewers and players made fun of the game and specifically the art style as resembling demented Chuck.E.Cheeses Animatronics, this caused Scott to feel really depressed but eventually he took the idea of a horror game with pizza place animatronics and turned it into the game/series Five Nights at Freddys, which quickly became viral online thanks to "Let's Play" YouTubers as well as lore speculation from channels like Game Theory. Scott would be open and active within the community for a very long time, until "foreshadowing" one controversy caused him to take a step back as a completely major figure in the series.

The original story is contained within the first game up-to the 6th and 7th entry, with newer stories being made with newer entries like the open-world Security Breach game.

2021 Political Donation Controversy

“” This message isn't specifically directly at the Freddit community; this is just the community that I care about the most and where I choose to post these things. I never cared much for Twitter anyway. To say that the last few days have been surreal would be an understatement. I've debated greatly how best to address this, including not addressing it at all, but with so many people from the LGBT community in the fanbase that I love, that's not an option. I'd like to think that the last seven years would have given me the benefit of the doubt in regards to how I try to treat people, but there I was, trending on twitter for being a homophobe, getting doxed, with people threatening to come to my house. My wife is six weeks pregnant and she spent last night in fear because of what was being said online. She has already been struggling with her pregnancy so seeing her so afraid really scared me. All this because I exercised my right, and my duty, as an American citizen, to vote for and support the candidates who I felt could best run the country, for everyone, and that's something that I won't apologize for. For those who took the time to look, you saw that the candidates I supported included men, women, white people, black people, republicans, and democrats. I supported Kimberly Klacik in Baltimore because I believed that she really cared for the African American community there and wanted to pull them out of poverty. I believed she could have really make a difference in a time when so many black communities were struggling. She lost, unfortunately. I supported Tulsi Gabbard, a democrat, even though I disagreed with her on several issues, because I felt she would have been a good and fair president. And yes, I supported President Trump, because I felt he was the best man to fuel a strong economy and stand up to America's enemies abroad, of which there are many. Even if there were candidates who had better things to say to the LGBT community directly, and bigger promises to make, I believed that their stances on other issues would have ended up doing much greater harm to those communities than good. All of this explanation, I fear, is wasted, as people don't want to discuss with one another anymore; they want endless apologies and submission. People who are expecting those from me will get neither. I've always been supportive of creators, and have tried to treat everyone fairly, and treat everyone with dignity and respect. I've never cared about anyone's race, religion, gender, or orientation. I just treat people as people, everyone the same, and because of that, I've ended up with a very diverse group of people that I've worked with over the years. It wasn't intentional. It just happened that way. I choose people who are best for the job; I treat everyone the same, and I ended up with people from all walks of life in my professional life and my personal life as well. That's the way it should be. That's the way I want it to be. That's the way I will continue to be. I'm a republican. I'm a Christian. I'm pro-life. I believe in God. I also believe in equality, and in science, and in common sense. Despite what some may say, all of those things can go together. That's not an apology or promise to change, it's the way it's always been. If I get cancelled, then I get cancelled. I don't do this for the money anymore; I do it because I enjoy it. If people think I'm doing more harm than good now, then maybe it's better that I get cancelled and retire. I would accept that. I've had a fulfilling career. Besides, most things that people can take from you are things that never had much value to begin with. I have always loved, and will continue to love, this community and this fanbase, even if someday it doesn't include me anymore.

—Scott Cawthon's response from the FNAF Subreddit.

In June of 2021 it was discovered that Scott Cawthon had made almost $40,000 worth of donations from 2015-2020 to several Republican Party politicians and causes including a 2019 donation to the then president of the United States Donald Trump, he also donated to one democratic candidate, that one being Tulsi Gabbard on the same day as his donation to Trump in 2019.

This lead to a controversy among many around the community that identified as LGBTQ as many of the politicians that Cawthon had supported were known for being homophobic and likely gave a few flashbacks to a few other previously beloved indie game developers whom were found to hold extremely problematic beliefs. Although to his credit at the time Gabbard was softening her homophobia to be more appealing to most people.

Cawthon would later make a post on the official FNaF Subreddit on his donations and that he claimed to have been doxxed and threatened over his donations. He confirmed his donations were accurate and clairified his stance as being aa self-identified Republican, Christian and was Pro-life. But also iterated that he believed in Equality, Science and Common sense and that to him those ideas weren't incompatible and said that meant that his statement wasn't an apology or a promise to change, rather it was him saying what his positions are. He also affirmed that he was pro LGBT despite his donations and has and would continue to work with a "diverse group of people".

He then said that he was fine with being "cancelled" from the community because he said he doesn't do the series for the money and rather does it for enjoyment, he said that if his fanbase decided what he believed in was causing "more harm than good" that he would accept being "cancelled" and would retire from the franchise and the fanbase if they decided he was problematic.

This statement seemingly was recieved well among those on the subreddit, with many coming to his defense with rebuttals about his other actions, including a charity stream that raised half a million dollars for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital as well as mentioning the Pro-LGBTQ+ community members whom Scott had worked with at the time.

Shortly after he would "retire" and posted a statement to the fans on his website saying he would no longer be part of game development and intended to eventually pass on creative control of the franchise to somebody else. However as of 2024 he still retains the exclusive rights to the franchise and continues to be semi-active in the direction of the series moving forward albeit at a much lesser role, his website is now blank and seemingly as the main story-line of the original games was ended with 2018's Ultimate Custom Night that there wasn't much else for him to do moving forward anyways, seemingly the community is still fairly supportive of Scott Cawthon with only the occasional one-liner reference joke or mention in retrospectives on fandom controversy videos being made at his expense.