FNAF World: How Scott Cawthon Turned His Biggest Failure Into a Success
Channel: Video Game Story Time
Date: 2018-01-19

Five Nights at Freddy's World holds an interesting lesson in dealing with failure.

While Scott Cawthon's reputation for making engaging games is fairly solid (it's hard to argue with all the Five Nights at Freddy's fans who genuinely enjoy each installment of the game), his initial attempt at making a roleplaying game, FNAF World, was somewhat less successful.

Herein lies a great opportunity for us to explore the success the comes from failure, and how a negative can be turned into a positive.

Ultimately, what matters most when making something creative (such as, say, a scary jumpscare video game filled with animatronic animals), is how you define success.

Success is about more than just getting people to play your game, or making lots of money, or even creating something that you're proud of.

True success comes from learning lessons, personally improving, and developing your own talents. Whatever goals you may set for a project, even if you don't meet your own expectations, you can count yourself a success if you've learned something along the way.

Perhaps some people will say that FNAF World wasn't a success; that the game's bad reputation, and the fact that Scott was unable to fully fix everything wrong with the finished game, shows that this was a wholly negative experience.

Certainly, we'll probably get a lot of comments that will express that sentiment.

As creators ourselves, though, we feel that what really matters is that we keep trying even when we make mistakes, and that true success comes from personal improvement, not from critical acclaim.

Ultimately, nobody else's opinion can change your own personal journey as you make things. While this channel usually focuses on big, impressive games that earn lots of critical acclaim, it's worth noting that success instead comes from your own personal journey, from facing your trials, and from overcoming challenges.

Are we saying this simply because our channel's growth has stagnated? Maybe. But there's a reason why we're still making YouTube videos even when our content isn't being watched by as many people.

We're here for our own personal journey, and from the love of creating stuff. It's the same passion that has driven Scott Cawthon in his work on the Five Nights at Freddy's series, and as such, we're doing our best to learn from his example of how to react when things don't initially go well.

Have a great day,
BretonStripes (http://twitter.com/bretonstriped) and Kotor (http://twitter.com/kotorcomics)

Patreon: http://patreon.com/videogamestorytime

Our first FNAF video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCo5mI7mySU

Music: Mesmerize by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/