Franchise: Fazbear Fanverse Initiative

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.

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 Scott 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 cancelled entirely.

A fangame called Chomper's was in development, with the hope that it could become a new title in the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative. However, due to drama involving the game's director, the whole game was cancelled before it was even sent to Scott Cawthon. Despite this, a pitch demo was eventually released for free on Game Jolt.

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.

In June 2022, fangame developer Kane Carter became involved in a dispute with Theft King, a prominent YouTuber in the Five Nights at Freddy's community, following a controversy regarding "The Pear", a private group chat used by popular fangame developers to share confidential data. One group member was Ultranight, the developer of the fangame "Chomper's", which was in talks to become part of the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative only for said plans to be aborted after The Pear's reveal. Following this scandal, Carter assured a Twitter user that FNaF series creator Scott Cawthon had not abandoned the Fanverse, but that it was possible he could stop accepting new entries to it due to "these kinds of unpredictable issues". This lead Theft King to make a video titled "The END of the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative?" with a thumbnail caption saying "GOODBYE FANVERSE", despite Carter's claims to the contrary.

This kick-started a month-long feud between them, in which Theft King claimed in a Discord DM to being harassed by Carter's fans, and that his comments ignored the video's positive content. Carter clarified that his comments were in regards to Cawthon's say over future entries, and that his main gripes with the video were the negative clickbait title and thumbnail, a point that Theft King missed. He also asked who was harassing him, but Theft King never responded or provided examples of it. He also publicly pointed out that Theft King had played his game Popgoes Arcade on a livestream a few days before the video's release, appearing to think of it as part of a failed product. In July, a video by a separate YouTuber named Sheeprampage with similar negative clickbait about the Fanverse prompted Carter to post a tweet complaining about this trend that many FNaF YouTubers had adopted, clarifying that this complaint was unrelated to Theft King. However, Theft King interjected by accusing him of taking the videos too personally, calling them "postmortems" of the Fanverse as a program or idea. Fans criticized his claims, stating that he misunderstood the situation, was spreading false narratives, and questioned why he called the videos "postmortems" on an ongoing collective. The next day, Theft King sent Carter another Discord DM claiming his fans were harassing him, and demanded he make a public tweet to end it. He chose not to do this, basing his decision on Theft King's poor handling of criticism, and for playing the victim card in public without any evidence of harassment, as more people came forward with examples of Theft King demanding public apologies for what he believed to be wrongdoings.

Despite claiming he did not want things to escalate, Theft King posted a video titled "An Open Letter to Kane Carter", where he claimed that he had always been positive about Carter's projects and showed clips talking about the Fanverse without a negative bias, but also falsely claimed that Carter had ignored his DMs on Twitter, for seemingly no other reason than to make him appear rude. Carter stated that he never criticized the content of his videos, only the thumbnails and titles, and tweeted a short response that lead to a "Rickroll" video that fellow fangame developer Phisnom used to prank people after writing false apologies. This culminated in Theft King hosting a YouTube livestream of him playing Popgoes Arcade while talking poorly of Carter. During the first hour of the stream, he claimed that Carter had offered to reach out to him on Twitter, but never did. Carter, who was watching the stream, posted a link to his alternate Twitter account proving that Theft King had never seen the messages to show that he was lying. Embarrassed, he ended the stream, but quickly started a second one which he later ended by saying "If there was a Hell, Kane Carter will burn for eternity". Theft King posted an apology on Twitter the next day, effectively ending the feud.