WARNING: I do not condone or recommend visiting the website mentioned on this post, or any of these "free games" websites, as it is wrong, and potentially dangerous.

So, it has just come to my attention that a page has stolen my fangame and posted it on their site (I will avoid linking it as to not put anyone at risk of malware)

I tend to look up "Ultimate Freddyverse" on Google sometimes just to see what pops up, one of the reasons being to check for these sort of situations where a game gets stolen and posted on some random website that hosts or just features different browser games.

I recommend that you all don't visit this site, or play any of the games on it, since most if not all games on there are likely stolen from other hard working game developers.

This is nothing new in terms of this happening to game devs, there exists several low quality, low effort pages where people steal and post games on their sites to earn money from it via publicity, by having all sorts of advertising on their sites.

They do this with all sorts of popular properties among kids online, like Poppy Playtime, Squid Game, Minecraft, Geometry Dash, etc.

Nevertheless, it is still somewhat sad to see people's work being stolen. It's happened to me about twice before. One of my games called "Penguintale" was stolen and put on two random game sites in the past, but they no longer feature the game it seems.

What's strange is that in the case of Ultimate Freddyverse being stolen, whoever runs this website for some reason listed the game as "FNAF Secret of the Mimic".

My only guess as to why is to bait young people into thinking they can play the upcoming FNaF game by just looking it up, and clicking some random link. However it's offputting, as Ultimate Freddyverse has very little to do with Secrets of the Mimic, so they basically just picked a random fangame to pose as Secrets of the Mimic on their site.

They even made up a description for the game, which if I had to guess is AI generated:

Jackie isn't even featured in Ultimate Freddyverse. Ultimate Freddyverse as a whole only has a single mention and appearance of the mimic in the form of a very rare easter egg, which just adds to the weirdness of this whole thing and makes me wonder why they picked this game out of all the ones they could have stolen to represent Secrets of the Mimic.

The theft of Ultimate Freddyverse doesn't bother me much, as I know that this is something common with all sorts of indie games, especially fangames, since they're based on popular franchises kids are into, and are often easy to steal by these people. If anything, I find it somewhat humorous and flattering in a way that they would find my game good enough to pass off as an "official game", but it's nothing too crazy.

However it is still bad that it was stolen at all, and you should not support this website, or any of these "free games" websites, as they leech off the work of others for a profit. This post is made not only to point this out, but also because I wanna bring attention to this practice that these shady people do to tell as many people as possible why this happens, and that it is wrong.

Not only is it wrong to support these websites, but it is also dangerous, as they can be full of things such as malware, which can affect your computer in countless ways, like stealing your information, damaging your system, etc.

Unfortunately there is nothing that I can personally do about this, since I do not own any intellectual property featured in Ultimate Freddyverse, and I don't have any sort of power to shut the game down, and this is a problem for many small developers too, so the most I can do is shed light on the topic.

It is ironic that they have a section about copyright infringement. They live off the work of others, and shamelessly act all innocent when it comes to copyright rules, as they purposely steal from small content creators who can't take action against them, or the content they steal affects the original brand so little that the companies often don't notice, or don't care enough to copyright strike them.

It has been stated by Scott Cawthon himself that he does not approve off making a profit from a fangame of his franchise, so it makes me sad that these people are making money out of a game I made with the intention of being a free experience, and a passion project.

Please don't support these websites, they are harmful, dangerous and cheap, they only steal for easy profit and don't care about who they steal from, if you wanna play games such as FNaF, it is always a better option to get the official games on Steam or consoles, or play fangames, or other free content on sites like Gamejolt, itch.io or Newgrounds, where creators post their legitimate work. And if you for some reason do decide to visit any of these websites, proceed with caution, and an add blocker and antivirus preferably.

If you wanna support me, play my games from Gamejolt or Itch.io only (this may be outdated someday), as they are the only platforms I use for uploading my games (Aside from Scratch but that's a different story), and thank you for reading my post.