Five Nights at Freddy’s Springtrap lands in Dead By Daylight’s testing servers today!
He always comes back.
The long awaited, long wished for crossover of Five Nights at Freddy’s and Dead By Daylight has finally reached its penultimate step before being fully realised. As part of Dead By Daylight’s 9th anniversary stream on the 27th May 2025, they gave everyone the first details and glimpses of the character that is by far the highest requested in the history of the game, William Afton a.k.a Springtrap. Having been locked inside the now rotting bunny costume and left to die but miraculously surviving due to pure rage, the killer dubbed “The Animatronic” will be available in Dead By Daylight for the general public on the 17th June 2025, although if you have Dead By Daylight on Steam you can try out the highly requested killer now as part of Behaviour’s testing servers known as the PTB.
Why is Springtrap so heavily requested?
There are multiple reasons that Springtrap, and by extension the Five Nights at Freddy’s universe is so heavily requested for any kind of crossover, whether it’s Dead By Daylight or Fortnite. The most straight forward and the one I feel is representative of most people is that the series has been running for over 10 years now (which the Dead By Daylight crossover was announced as part of), it’s no secret that the Freddy’s fanbase skews younger, and throughout the years it’s been made clear that it wants to be seen as an entry point to horror, almost like a Goosebumps, something that will scare children but not rely on abundance of gore, sadism and the mental scarring to do it. The fans that were first hooked (no pun intended) with the series are now adults and want to see the characters that terrified them so much when they were younger to be fully realised into an adult horror setting. There are other reasons too such as giving respect to the Freddy’s series, many people may not like the series for it’s convoluted plot and reliance on jump scares, but even they would have to accept that Freddy is now a horror icon, with an entire multimedia empire backing him up in the form of Games, Books, Movies and abundance of merchandise.
The final reason that probably both side can agree on why they want this crossover to happen is that people want it to happen for memes.
Why did it take so long?
Dead By Daylight is no stranger to cross overs, horror icon such as Leatherface, Alien, Freddy Kruger, Chucky and Michael Myers have all made the jump into Dead By Daylight’s Entity’s warm embrace. You would think that being able to negotiate with those characters IP holders it would be much easier to negotiate with a small indie developer of Five Nights At Freddy’s, however the series creator, Scott Cawthon, had historically been against crossovers as mentioned in an interview he done with YouTuber “Dawko” back in August 2024, where Cawthon explains his hesitance with doing crossovers giving the reasoning of wanting the crossovers to make sense and he doesn’t want to devalue the IP by having crossovers with every other property, with people online voicing scepticism on this claim due to the Freddy’s brand often crossing over with Funko Pop, even so far as being prominently included in the gameplay and marketing of Funko Fusion game. That being said, Cawthon does admit that he’s trying to be better with allowing other IP’s crossover with Freddy’s. One thing for sure is that fans of both Five Nights At Freddy’s and Dead by Daylight are incredibly excited for Springtrap making his way through the fog into Dead By Daylight on 17th June 2025 for all platforms, until then non-Steam users will have to make do with videos from content creators.
