"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.