Dave and Buster's is an edgy arcade+alcohol place that plenty of people brings kids to. I took some friends who were 19 and 20 and we were turned away at the door.

"Nobody wants to take their kids to an “edgy food and entertainment place”,"

This is 100% wrong though, my 5 year old is in kindergarten and they LOVED FNAF. Like, seriously a lot.

I've done my fair share of Chuck E Cheese birthday parties - the place near me already doesn't have animatronics etc and is virtually unrecognizable by people who knew it in the 90s. It's literally just a single big room with 5 very long tables to host 3-5 birthday parties concurrently, taking up about 40% of the space. Then there's a smallish trampoline area (which requires paying an additional $10 or $15 or somesuch amount) comprising 10% or so, then the other 50% is just arcade machines laid out in a grid that take a card scan instead of coins, and pay out non-tangible credits instead of physical tickets.

So I assume that's the future here - take a low-rent semi-large space off a side-street of a main road, fill it with low-operating-cost stuff, and let it collect revenue. Pretty sensible business, and also utterly soulless and has absolutely no cultural or sticking power.

I really cannot believe FNAF hasn't done some kind of play here - you could absolutely charge 2-4x the price of Chuck E Cheese's parties for a FNAF-themed "what-a-6-year-old-calls-scary" birthday party / event space and no kid would ever go to Chuck E Cheese ever again.

I'm guessing it's because Chuck E Cheese is busy being mediocre and barely existing, and why do physical stuff when you can make millions off selling plushies and funkos.

So I really think this is just a case of capitalism being too lazy and profit-motivated to bother with providing something people - kids - would definitely want.