Pingle and Steel Wool Studios Team Up on 12 Projects to Expand the Legendary Franchise
$70m
franchise
value
93%
rating
on Steam
28
video games
released
/ Testimonials /
Players love a “shockingly great destruction system”
90/100
Entertaining, engaging and enveloping; once Five Nights at Freddy’s clasps its paws around you, it will be hard to let go.
80/100
It's a first-person horror game, but the boogeyman jumping out of the closet isn't its payoff—it's the creeping buildup of dread watching that doorknob slowly turn.
90/100
Five Nights at Freddy's is horror done right. No slasher techniques, no gore necessary. The terror comes from simplicity.
80/100
The real miracle here is that the game communicates its gut-wrenching horror without a single drop of blood, yet still belongs in the upper echelon of horror games.
90/100
Entertaining, engaging and enveloping; once Five Nights at Freddy’s clasps its paws around you, it will be hard to let go.
80/100
It's a first-person horror game, but the boogeyman jumping out of the closet isn't its payoff—it's the creeping buildup of dread watching that doorknob slowly turn.
90/100
Five Nights at Freddy's is horror done right. No slasher techniques, no gore necessary. The terror comes from simplicity.
80/100
The real miracle here is that the game communicates its gut-wrenching horror without a single drop of blood, yet still belongs in the upper echelon of horror games.
/ Project overview /
Pingle & Steel Wool Studios
About the game
Five Nights At Freddy’s is a first-person survival horror that throws players into Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, where they must survive the night amidst malfunctioning animatronics. Released in August 2014, Five Nights at Freddy’s became a global sensation, selling over 4.74 million units on Steam across its first six games.
Client
Solution
Optimization
Porting
Engine
Unreal Engine 4
Platforms
Release
12
Partnership timeline
2021-2024
About Pingle & Steel Wool Studios partnership
Steel Wool connected with Pingle through Devoted Studios, launching our collaboration in 2022. What followed was a whirlwind of VR porting, flat mode development, optimization, and localization across a dozen projects.
/ The Challenge /
Growing an iconic franchise across multiple platforms, from Switch to Oculus
The Steel Wool team had too much on their plate, so they turned to Pingle for help.
First challenge – porting FNAF: Security Breach to Nintendo Switch
Then, we had to optimize the game for PS4 and Xbox One
Finally, a long-term partnership with a team of 30 experts to deliver 10 more projects over the next 16 months
Here’s how we brought this iconic franchise to life across multiple platforms.
Have a similar challenge?
We can help!
/ Phase 1 /
Switch port praised by community, secures 2 more projects for Pingle
Porting Security Breach to Nintendo Switch was tough because the game’s eerie atmosphere relies on detailed visuals and rich sound design, both of which had to be heavily optimized to run on the console’s limited hardware. We had to carefully rework lighting, textures, and audio while keeping the game running smoothly on Switch.
How did we achieve it? Fine-tuned textures, compressed lighting, and manually adjusted levels to preserve the tense vibe while optimizing performance.
1
Reduced the game size from 90GB on PC to 7.8GB on Switch
2
Scaled textures by 2x to 4x and compressed lightmaps by 50% to fit within Switch limitations
After the release, the community praised the Switch version for outperforming the PS4 in terms of stability. Seeing the results of our work, Steel Wool Studios asked us to bring the game versions for PS4 and Xbox One up to that same standard.
/ Phase 2 /
Players on PS4 and Xbox get a lag-free experience, rescue mission accomplished
PS4 and Xbox One players were facing performance issues like lag, long load times, and texture pop-ins in Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach. The game was struggling under the weight of unoptimized assets and too much VFX, making the overall experience clunky.
So we dove into the game’s guts, trimming content, optimizing textures, and fine-tuning everything from the fog system to the Level Streaming. With a mix of creative solutions and technical tweaks, we made the game shine on both PS4 and Xbox One.
Here’s what we achieved:
1
CPU load reduced by up to 50%
2
Textures compressed 2x more efficiently, freeing up memory
3
Memory usage cut down
4
Significantly improved visual quality
5
Load times noticeably reduced
/ Phase 3 /
Pingle's team of 30 brings all FNAF games to all platforms, including VR
In early 2024, Steel Wool Studios and Pingle signed a contract for a dedicated 30-person team to manage all upcoming FNAF projects. Our team, already well-versed in the franchise, was ready to tackle new ports, including VR, in the months ahead.
1
Help Wanted ported to PlayStation VR2
Port FNAF: Help Wanted to PSVR2? Intense! The project required us to balance the game’s mechanics and visuals with VR specifics. After multiple audits and adjustments, we managed to optimize it for a seamless VR experience.
2
Next up: Virtual Reality Help Wanted 2 goes flat
Then, we moved on to adapting Help Wanted 2 – the next installment – into flat versions for PC and PS5. We had to rethink the core mechanics from the ground up. In VR, interactions with characters are intuitive. But in the flat mode, each interaction required intricate camera movements and a completely new logic. Even the shooting mechanics, already tricky in VR, demanded precise physics adjustments to feel natural with traditional controls.
This was one of our toughest projects, demanding us to rethink the game design, but we’ve pulled it off. Help Wanted 2 is just as terrifying outside of VR.
3
Fans’ favorite DLC available across platforms
Ruin, the free story DLC for Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach, was released in July 2023 and quickly became all fans’ favorite, earning over 3,300 positive Steam reviews and a 4.33/5 rating on PlayStation.
Then came the challenge of porting it to Xbox and Switch. We had to optimize the visuals, adjust the lighting, and tweak gameplay to ensure smooth performance, especially on Switch. On top of that, we worked on compatibility issues specific to each platform. Now Ruin is available to a wider audience.
4
Help Wanted 2 comes to Oculus in record 3 months
Meta’s Oculus headset is one of the most possessed VR devices in the world, with the Quest 2 VR headsets used by 22.91% of Steam gamers. Help Wanted 2 couldn’t miss out on these users, so we started porting the game to Oculus devices.
These headsets run on an Android-based platform, which means we needed to switch to forward rendering (with its compromises in visual fidelity) and tackle performance spikes. We also faced limitations in how many sound effects could play at once and had to redesign some gameplay logic. Despite these hurdles, in just 3 months, we achieved a stable 72 FPS performance and met Meta’s strict certification requirements just on time.
5
FNAF projects’ timelines super short, thanks to smart management
We assembled a flexible team of 30 experts and made sure everyone had hands-on experience with every project, which we ran in parallel. There were times when we needed additional expertise on short notice. Thanks to the team’s familiarity with every project, they effortlessly switched between ports and adaptations, helping us hit an average turnaround of 3.5 months per project.
Over these two years, our team stayed fixed on FNAF. We rotated the team members across different projects, so everyone knew them inside out. We delivered each project in about 3.5 months on average.
Roman Tymashov
Project Manager at Pingle
/ The results /
Together with Pingle, Steel Wool Studios brings FNAF to every platform
Before
After
Steel Wool needed a dedicated team for 12 projects, including VR porting, flat mode development, and optimizations
We put together a 30-person squad that knew FNAF inside and out
Porting to Switch was a mission impossible due to the game’s ambient sounds, VFX, and graphics
Delivered high performance on Switch and great visual fidelity
PS4 and Xbox One versions were struggling with performance
Fixed crashes, boosted stability, optimized both versions. Have an emergency? We've got you
Adapting to flat versions was tough – how to keep the same feel as in VR?
Rethought game interactions and mechanics from scratch, adapted shooting and camera movements
Needed to balance performance with tricky VR limitations
Achieved 72 FPS on the Oculus Quest and 120 FPS on PSVR2
/ The team /
Cast
8 Unreal Engine Developers
9 QA Engineers
8 Technical Artists
1 Game Designer
1 Project Manager
1 Sound Designer
1 UI/UX Designer
/ Cases /
Explore more case studies
From technically demanding titles to stylistically unique games, we've helped dozens of developers scale their games’ success on new platforms. In record times.
