There's a Wes Anderson film called the French Dispatch which features a short story that really resonates with me. It's about an artist in a prison who paints flesh-colored blobs using Lea Seydoux's nude body as a reference. An art salesman played by Adrien Brody finds these paintings, and presents them to a group of investors, looking to make a killing off the prisoner's work. In the presentation, Adrien Brody shows the investors an illustration of a perfect sparrow, showing that the prisoner knows how to make realistic art, but chooses to make pink flesh blobs out of Lea Seydoux's naked body; saying it's the difference between a good artist and a genius artist.

Cruelty Squad was made by a genius artist.

So, imagine if Scott Cawthon released the first 2 nights of the first fnaf game (let’s imagine that the concept of a “children’s horror franchise” already existed as it does today), and then promised to release the rest as standalone pieces, but before that: released merch, had insane amount of YouTube videos, started work on a movie and announced a line of whatever the 2014 equivalent of NFTs were. Poppy Playtime is less of a game and more of an experiment to see how much money a guy can make off an incredibly safe (and apparently stolen) “videogame”. This is everything that indie games shouldn’t be.