Franchise: Fazbear Fanverse Initiative

According to developer Nikson in 2023, Five Nights at Freddy's creator Scott Cawthon had expressed interest in adding his fangame Those Nights at Rachel's to the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative, but he declined the offer as he was more interested in developing a remake of The Joy of Creation than remaking Those Nights at Rachel's. Nikson had previously stated he had no future plans for the game out of his own lack of interest.

In 2021, Mairusu claimed that his Five Nights at Freddy's fangame, Five Nights in Anime, would be part of the next wave of the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative, even having a "teaser" on the Scott Games website. However, he revealed the next day that this was just an April Fools joke.

When explaining what other games can or can't be added to the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative in the future, POPGOES creator Kane Carter revealed that Scott Cawthon was against mature and illegal content like vulgar language, sex, and drugs appearing in anything related to Five Nights at Freddy's. As such, it was unlikely that games like Dayshift at Freddy's and Five Nights at Fuckboy's would be added to the Initiative. He also revealed that Cawthon tries to avoid the usage of copyrighted material, and unfortunately, several fangames use content taken from already established IPs or real-life restaurants. This meant that games like Jolly and Jollibee's, Five Nights at Treasure Island, Five Nights at Wario's, and Five Nights with Mac Tonight were all out of the picture due to all of them using copyrighted characters.

In August 2023, several days following a controversy, Phisnom announced that he had been terminated from the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative and would no longer be developing Five Nights at Freddy's Plus. Prior to this, he had been banned from the game's Steam forums and removed as a developer. The day after he announced his removal, the game's Steam page was removed from the public, and on November 10th, all videos and posts related to the game on both Twitter and YouTube were made private, leading to the belief that the game had been canceled entirely. After over a year of silence, on November 27, 2024, this belief was solidified when an information header was added to the SteamDB page for the game, revealing the app was retired off Steam completely.

In 2022, an anonymous whistleblower revealed that three Five Nights at Freddy's fan game developers, Ultranite, Ramenov, and Mechlus, had been secretly conspiring to collect sensitive personal information and development resources for other unreleased Five Nights at Freddy's fan games for coercive and exploitative purposes. If any of them were confronted, they planned to blackmail accusers by threatening to leak their personal information online, or anonymously dump everything they amassed onto 4chan. All three developers released statements confirming the allegations and ending their involvement in the series' fan community.

In the aftermath of this controversy, four fan games in development were cancelled. Ultranite's game Chomper's, which was in talks with FNaF series creator Scott Cawthon to join the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative, was cancelled, with the remaining development team releasing the game's unfinished demo builds for free. Ultranite also stepped down as co-director of another game called Jolly 4, which would later be cancelled for separate reasons. Ramenov distanced himself from the game Jr.'s, which was eventually completed and released by his remaining team, while another game called Five Nights with Talking Ben was cancelled. Mechlus' game Jet Black was also cancelled.

According to Kane Carter (creator of the POPGOES series of fangames), Scott Cawthon had contacted IvanG about possibly allowing the Jolly series to become part of the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative, unaware that the series was based on the real-life Filipino fast food chain Jollibee. Before accepting Scott's invitation, IvanG posted a picture on his Twitter of Jolly with a PlayStation 4 controller. This alerted the other Fanverse devs, who promptly told Scott about both the copyrighted material in Jolly and the fact that Ivan was teasing the Fanverse, ultimately leading the series to be dropped from the project.

Aftonbuilt was created as a pitch to Scott Cawthon for an original game made for the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative, but it was declined. The game's existence, as well as a demo, were first revealed on April 22, 2022.