Scott Cawthon, creator of the Five Nights At Freddy’s horror game series, has announced that he will retire from game development to focus on personal pursuits. The announcement was posted on Cawthon’s official website, and vaguely referenced some responses he had gotten over the last week. This comes just four days after he made a “last post” on the FNAF subreddit where he stated that “maybe it’s better that [he] get canceled and retire.”
Cawthon has been embroiled in a controversy over the past few weeks. Twitter users found out he had donated thousands of dollars to politicians and political candidates with transphobic and homophobic political views. These politicians included Mitch McConnell (to whom he donated $5000), Tulsi Gabbard (another $2500), and even former president Donald Trump.
According to Cawthon’s Reddit post, after the information got out he started “trending on Twitter for being a homophobe, getting doxxed, with people threatening to come to [his] house.” In defense of his political contributions, Cawthon stated that the candidates he supported “included men, women, white people, black people, republicans, and democrats.” While he stated that he supported Trump “because [he] felt he was the best man to fuel a strong economy and stand up to America’s enemies abroad,” he failed to mention how these candidates would frequently propose and support legislation denying the LGBT community basic human rights.
Instead of supporting candidates that did protect the LGBT community, Cawthon stated:
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.
In his retirement announcement, Cawthon states that he has seen “tremendous love and support over this last week, a lot of which has come from the LGBTQ community.” He adds that, while he will be retiring, the Five Nights At Freddy’s series will still continue. “Someone else will eventually be running the show,” Cawthon states, and that person will be “someone of [his] choosing, and someone that [he] trust[s].”
