I did an interview with Finn Staber at Meta Connect 2025 reflecting about on his journey into VR from co-founding The Wave VR to then forming Chicken Waffle to developing the games of Baby Hands, Cowbots and Aliens, Shadow of Valhalla, Blazer League, and MarsXR. We also reflect on the current state of VR gaming with Meta, and some of the feedback he’s been providing to them from the perspective of an independent, third-party game developer. You can see more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of special computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my coverage of MetaConnect 2025, today's episode is with Finn Staber, who's the CEO and founder of Chicken Waffle. They've done like four different VR games and experiences, and it's a bit of a retrospective of Finn's journey into the space and all the different major projects he's worked on over the years. He was one of the co-founders of The Wave and worked on location-based entertainment experiences, and then different games, and then built different worlds. He's basically done a lot of different things within the context of VR, and also just some reflections of what's happening within the larger ecosystem of VR gaming, how Meta has been treating the store, some of the different feedback that he's been providing to Meta in that context. He's a VR developer that has been in the space for a long time and just a really fascinating journey of getting nine different college degrees through the Army and in service and all the different games and experiences and things he's worked in within the context of the VR industry. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Finn happened on Thursday, September 18th, 2025 at the MetaConnect conference at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:32.173] Finn Staber: Hi, I'm Finn Staber. I'm the CEO, programmer slash designer slash visual effects slash janitor at Chicken Waffle. We do immersive VR games and cool cutting edge content, AR promotional partnership stuff and just try to have fun living life.
[00:01:51.075] Kent Bye: Nice. And maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space. Sure.
[00:01:56.321] Finn Staber: So my background, I'm born and raised in Austin, Texas, one of the rare natives there. And I joined the US Army right out of high school and went to war a few times. Came back unscathed somehow. Injured but unscathed from the war, at least. Got into college, decided to get my medical degree in biomedical engineering. Decided I didn't want to be a doctor after that, and so I started doing a 2D animation degree. So I finished the 2D animation degree. Ended up with nine degrees, actually. 2D animation, 3D animation, 3D game art, video game design, audio engineering, software engineering, and video game programming.
[00:02:33.462] Kent Bye: Wait, so you got degrees in all those from college or?
[00:02:35.806] Finn Staber: Oh my God. So, well, the army paid me to go to school. So I figured, hey, the more I go to school, the more I get. So like I would take about 38 hours per semester. So I ended up with, I think, 378 credit hours, which is. Holy shit. yeah it's a lot it's a lot of it's like you know going to school 16 hours a day six days a week but again like i was getting paid so and then i worked on the weekends as a mechanic so i um also recently started a car restoration shop we build old hot rods and custom, you know, supercars and stuff and deliver and train people how to drift and pop wheelies in their monster car, you know, so it's a lot of fun. It also takes up the other side of the brain, takes me out of the computer, work on a car that only has a fuse box, no computer, you know, and so that's a lot of fun. And, you know, I think working with the community is really important, you know, helping grow. I ran the Austin Unity Meetup group for 12 years and the Austin IGDA helped co-organize and just I think philanthropy is really important. We, as the tip of the spear, need to be there for the ones that are coming after. We need to help the youth of today as the leadership of tomorrow. And so I feel like we have a responsibility to pick up the trash on the side of the river, right? And that's us. That's us now, and we can't wait for them to do it.
[00:03:50.239] Kent Bye: And so when did VR come onto your radar, and how did that fit into your career trajectory?
[00:03:55.160] Finn Staber: Oh, well, so I was actually, funny thing, I got to play around with like old military VR while I was in from like, I was in the army from 2000 to 2004. Had some old, archaic, like three frames per second VR headsets. You know, it was like pretty bad. It was the equivalent of Atari tanks in VR. It was not great. But early on, I worked for Richard Garriott on a big MMO. And, you know, he's Lord British, you know, one of the grandfathers of video games and very influential and charismatic and fun person and had the privilege to note Palmer Lucky. So he came to the studio, brought one of the very first DK1s and left it on my desk. And then Elon Musk got to try VR for his first time on my VR headset at my desk and just kind of dig into those prototypes. I wrote the early white papers on the Oculus DK1 working with the gear vr the white papers on that stuff and just started partnering with different people building innovative stuff we then kind of launched into wave as co-founder and cto of wave and we built a you know immersive music performance experiences and was really amazing and then we uh upon Gaining funding, I realized, you know, I had another, I was working, I've never worked not five jobs, right? And so I had an opportunity to do a really cool project with Ready Player One, with Warner Brothers and Vive. And so that allowed me to kind of shift gears, sidestep, and start a new company, Chicken Waffle. focused around actually a cool Ready Player One game that ended up getting canceled because Wizards of the West Coast and Warner Brothers ended up, I don't know what the back story of why they lost the license, but it wasn't in the movie. And so our game kind of got stopped at about five months. And so I really had this really amazing team from the funding, but now nowhere to go. So we kind of just jumped over and started building our own content and supplying work for hire of partner studios.
[00:05:50.788] Kent Bye: you know branded product ar packaging or fun stuff you know and it's just you know we try to focus on cool innovative stuff and then sometimes people reach out to us and say hey can you lift this heavy rock up and pretty good at that yeah my recollection of meeting you and coming across your experiences of chicken waffle were at like augmented world expo play area you seem to have a number of different experiences over the years was that in the time frame where once you had the cancelled game is that when you started to just prototype these different experiences? My recollection is, like, coming across you and these experiences on the playground of Augmented World Expo. Oh, yeah.
[00:06:27.943] Finn Staber: Yeah, so that was, I guess, 2019, maybe? 2018? I don't remember. I formed Chicken Waffle in January of 2017 and started doing, you know, multiple different projects. But, yeah, we had—so I guess, yeah, that's about right. Whenever Augmented World Expo— We had a huge 60 foot by 30 foot trust system VR. I think it was, uh, we had 21 rifts and a few, the Santa Cruz quests back then, you know, the early, early quests. And we were playing, yeah, we had blazer league, which is like a virtual disc kind of like Tron meets Ender's game. Pretty fun. And then, uh, We had baby hands, the virtual reality baby simulations, zany, wild imagination sequences and stuff. And that was really cool, prototyping these things and early multiplayer experiences, trying to figure out social early on before there was a lot of examples. That was both difficult and really fun, right? Because when it's the Wild West and you're just you know, building into the ether, you're free, right? Now we're seeing best practices. Now we're seeing like what actually works. I mean, there's pros and cons to both sides, right? Is like if you work inside of a bubble, maybe you're more inclined to know how to pop it. But if you work outside the box, It's very freeing, but you might not ever make any money. So we have prototyped, oh, how many games? And it's hard to know when to stop whenever you're putting a lot of passion into something. That's probably the hardest thing in video game development is you're not building a game you don't have passion for. You have a lot of passion. So it's really hard to swallow the pill of maybe this isn't going to work. We need to stop doing this. And so we have. We've shifted gears several times. Early on, a lot of the arcade focus. That time that you're talking about, there was a lot of focus on the upcoming v arcade right in 2019 was huge it was 2020 was supposed to be the year of v arcades and it was it was on track until of course the pandemic kind of shut down the world nobody wanted to go and put a vr headset on their face that somebody else just put on their face and so realistically that market dwindled now it didn't dwindle for everybody but we kind of had to take a step off because as a self-funded indie studio you can't just keep building things that don't make money you know what i'm saying
[00:08:42.433] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so did you ever ship any games?
[00:08:44.693] Finn Staber: Oh yeah, so Baby Hands. That has been a lot of fun. We're at 1.3 billion gameplay views, I think, on YouTube. A lot of zany, fun stuff. We shipped Shadow of Valhalla. It's a physics-based Viking combat game. We shipped... Cowbots and Aliens with our friends over at Wizard Games. That one was fun. It was an early, early VR arcade title for the Vive. They just had one build, and I just remember playing it at VRLA back in 2016 or something, this prototype feeling, and I was like, this is really cool. And then fast forward to, I guess, 2021, 2022. It was still one of the top VR arcade games, but it didn't have any of the newer features. It didn't have locomotion. They didn't have a lot of features. So we reached out and we said, hey, look, we want to ramp up on our publishing side of things. So we brought it in. We actually revamped the entire game. We did all the art. We did all the programming. Brought it up to speed with the newest stuff. Launched it on Quest. Launched it on cross platform. So we're on PlayStation VR on several titles. PlayStation VR, Steam, Pico. And last but not least, of course, is the Meta store. I'd say it's probably 80% of the revenue. Then last year, Meta reached out to us and asked us to build a mixed reality experience with the Quest. And so we built Steelcore, which is a... kind of a rock-em-sock-em robots, real steel kind of thing. So you're puppeteering a virtual mech around. And we had a little Mark Zuckerberg mech in there. We called it Mech Zuckerberg, you know. And it was pretty cool, you know. It's been a lot of fun. So we ended up releasing it for free. And now we're working on Baby Hands 2, Grandma's House. So you're crawling around in Zany Grandma's House area. And we're working on... Steelcore 2, so it's going to be a premium title that has some more content in it. Probably cheap or maybe even free-to-play. We're not really sure with that one. I think we're just building it for the passion of mixed reality and maybe see what's happening with the next generation of smart glasses or smart glass. And then we've been working on a pretty fun... secret project with Paramount. So that's really exciting. And I can't wait to talk about it, but can't yet. Can't publicly. But I guess if you sniff around, there's probably something out there about it from them. But I don't want to be the one spilling the beans on the floor.
[00:10:56.260] Kent Bye: Nice. And so what are you the most excited about here at MediConnect?
[00:11:00.205] Finn Staber: Well, it's hard to say. I had an amazing meeting with Meta yesterday. What they've done for just support for devs is phenomenal. That's important. I mean, large stacks of money would always be great. But realistically, inviting us in, certain key developers to lay out what they're doing, explain AI, explain hand tracking, explain benchmarks, explain the store page, explain launch processes, and then... ask us, what are we doing wrong? That's what they ask us. And that's extremely refreshing to see a large company that's really a world conglomerate say, what are we doing wrong? And actively listening and then actively change what they're doing by the next year. I've seen it year after year now. they take in what we're saying and say, hey, we should be doing this better because look, the people that are coming up here from indie studios and partner studios and stuff, they have nothing to lose. They don't work for Meta and that's really important to get those people's point of view. And so that's been really refreshing. So I think that's actually what I've been most excited about is hearing other people in the industry from around the world giving feedback on what doesn't work in the store, in the marketplace, in the SDKs, in the build process, in the whatever, right? And ask for change and then see if it's happening every year. And then, you know, over the past few days, I've heard all these great inputs on where AI is going and can we have this instead for asset generation? Can we have this instead for code generation? Can we have this instead for build processes and, you know, data munging? seeing Meta implement really great innovative ideas from cutting-edge developers in the community around the world.
[00:12:37.720] Kent Bye: Did you have any thoughts or feedback or of anything that Meta might be doing wrong?
[00:12:42.223] Finn Staber: Well, you know, I felt... I felt like, I mean, the marketplace has a lot of black box to it. The build process has a lot of black box, and they have to because otherwise other people eat their lunch. And I'm seeing it rapidly change back towards what we've wanted. A lot of people last year were saying, hey, look, the marketplace is not acting like every other digital marketplace. It's not acting like the PlayStation store. It's not acting like the Xbox store, Steam, or even Netflix, where if you search for something, it should be the first thing in the list. Discovery should be based on what's hot and what's not. You should be able to filter. And so they're growing, they're changing. I think with AI, it's risky business that you don't want to devalue people's jobs. So I think what they're doing with Horizon, I'd like to see a little bit more emphasis like we have previous years on standalone developer apps, because I still think that even with the rise of Verizon and trying to eat the lunch of Roblox and Fortnite, still the emphasis on standalone VR apps for their marketplace, I think needs to be a little bit more in the forefront still, even though I understand their emphasis that I could have used a little bit more of that in the keynote, right?
[00:13:51.425] Kent Bye: Right, yeah, for sure. You sound very optimistic and positive. A lot of what I've heard from developers is a lot of frustration of all these changes over the years, and have you felt the impact of all those changes?
[00:14:00.837] Finn Staber: Sure, well, I have a tendency to be positive, right? I've been to war several times and got blown up and still laugh and joke about it, right? I think that's important that we... We understand what is costly. That's the biggest thing. Like a small decision from the top at Meta can close studios down at the bottom. So it can be a little frustrating whenever you put a lot into it and push. But again, it's almost hard to say it because I see the developer relations people growing, the emphasis on helping us grow, yet we've also seen across the board VR revenue from studios cut in half into a third. I mean, and that's scary for the future of a studio that has employees already. You know, like, nobody wants to lay people off, and that's kind of scary. But I don't know if it's their fault or if it's... collectively the marketplace opening up, so discovery goes down, or future changes that haven't been implemented, maybe emphasis on things that are not VR, caught because of bean counters and investors, they have to focus on that, whereas the other stuff that's actually the bread and butter for other partners gets lost. And so, I hate to be critical on anybody, but I'd say that, yeah, a lax on emphasis on first-party titles is going to hurt a lot of indie studios.
[00:15:21.266] Kent Bye: Yeah, there seems to be a lot of focus on AI and how AI is going to be the primary content experience of both generation and experience with the direction where they seem to be going. So yeah, for me it felt like even in this developer keynote was so much around like, here's these AI tools for how to create Horizon Worlds where there may be a lot of third party developers that may be other, although they did announce like there is a developer SDK for the wearables, so they are at least opening up the possibility of having early access to having third-party developers start to create some what seem to be very bounded experiences for the new meta Ray-Ban display smart glasses.
[00:15:59.548] Finn Staber: And the neural band is really what I'm most excited about, maybe, because I could see two neural bands on my wrist playing VR, and all of a sudden, with the ability to track those bands and all the EKG input, you can then do like the problem with a lot of like hand tracked only games is you lose tracking right if it's behind your back or it's down below or if you're swinging your arm too fast like in shadow of valhalla it's a physics-based combat game and so if you're swinging your hand really fast you lose tracking if you try to throw something it didn't notice you opened your hand at the right moment right so i think with the neural band that's a great opportunity not just for the wearable glasses but to open your hands up in VR, which is a lot of fun. The biggest problem with hand-tracked-only games is having to do the same input more than once to try to do something that's a resultant. And nobody wants to... A game designer doesn't want to do that unless it's like... Like, Hand Physics Lab is great because it's kind of just goof around and play, but... even in the best experiences like that you'll still have instances where you got to try the input two or three times before it pinched it like this or oh you missed it because you're there's no tangible button there's not a finite joystick movement things like that and so there's a delay and things like that so i could see with the neural band that really changing how hand-tracked experiences are done too. I'm stoked for it. Realistically, with the SDK for the new hardware, that's great because it allows us to start building early adopters to build it for the new hardware. But realistically, from the Quest 2 forward, we've been able to prototype for smart glasses with a mixed reality. Of course, the pass-through is not fantastic. You probably don't want to drive down the road with your pass-through headset on. That might be good. But it's exciting, right? Don't ride your bike in a VR headset. We're not there yet, right? But that's why I like with all the mountain biking down a mountain with my Ray-Bans on. That sounds pretty cool. They didn't show you that, but they showed Mark walking upstairs and not falling, which I don't know if I could do it. I could barely do it without the glasses walking upstairs without falling.
[00:18:03.416] Kent Bye: Nice, and finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:18:09.550] Finn Staber: That's a great question. You know, building social experiences like Fail to Render Comedy Club or, you know, virtual concerts with Wave and stuff. It's really amazing to go somewhere on a Friday night and take off the headset, you're back at home. And this is from somebody that's able-bodied. I can go out if I wanted to. But there's a lot of people that don't. There's accessibility issues. There's maybe mental issues that don't allow somebody to feel comfortable in public. And they can go somewhere and be in public. They can attend a social event. They can attend a conference. They can attend... different things. I think the transformative nature of virtual reality specifically allows people to do things that one, either they wouldn't physically be able to do or two, maybe break through certain barriers that mentally they've grown into scars from their youth. Maybe they were teased. Maybe they have something about their appearance that makes them uncomfortable about being around others. And so virtual reality not only allows them to get back into a social environment but maybe that spawns them wanting to go in person too because they start getting used to being around people i mean we found people fall in love in vr then get married in vr you know i mean i would recommend you meeting the person first in real life but maybe again maybe that's not what they're going for i think i've met so many people i think maybe we even met for no we probably met irl for the first time but so many people i've met for the first time in vr that i know now in reality which that's why I have to wear a giant chicken waffle logo on my shirt because otherwise people won't know who I'm looking at you know but uh I think what I really like is the notion of being inside the game right and as as we get more battery technology increases better processing better retinal displays where it's almost real that's what I'm really excited about I love being inside the game I love being fully immersed like whether it be chopping the head off of a zombie as a Viking, or being a zany little Rugrats baby and crawling all over the place and teleporting yourself into a superhero mini-game or, you know, playing with toys and stuff. I think that kind of notion is, it's really fun to watch, you know, six foot four 250 pound dude with a beard like start giggling around and go stick stuff in the light sockets and stick the peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the vcr and you know get into your grandma's house and play with their dentures and stuff like it's just fun because people become the baby i've had i don't know hundreds of demos that people take the headset off they go oh i forgot about my body because the floor is like chest height you know so like and they're giggling and trying to do all the things that a baby would do, like stick everything in your mouth and do dangerous shit that's probably going to end up killing you. It's really funny to watch people do this and then see the other games like I Am Cat and Gorilla Tag that were inspired by Baby Hands' controls that also people are just gravitate to because it's so transformative. You're not a human, right? You're not even a bind by the laws of physics, right? One of the mini-games in Baby Hands 2, Grandma's House, is if you go into the uncle's room, who still lives at home, and tear all of his collectible toys out of their packages, or his comic books, or delete his hard drive, whatever. And there's a little superhero dude that you can take up to the poster. And as soon as you reach up to the poster, you teleport into a superhero flying around the city and wrecking asteroids and red robots that are attacking the city. And that notion of flying around like Superman, it's extremely freeing. I mean, it's like a dream, right? It's like a flying dream, which is notably one of the best dreams you can ever have in your life, if you can imagine you were flying. And so we're able to just do that, right? I mean, seeing people skydive whenever they can. I can't skydive. I got a metal shoulder. I'd probably rip off if I tried to skydive. Be like Bucky off of the Avengers, you know what I mean, with the metal arm. Only not buff with metal arm. But yeah, I think seeing what it's done for the industry also, just we're seeing people that otherwise would have never been game developers I think one of the speakers today was saying, I just got into it a couple years ago. We weren't even doing this, and now as soon as we tried it, we realized this is where we have to go. I've seen that time and time again, people shifting their whole paradigm, their whole executive summary for their company because of trying a VR demo, and I think that's extremely refreshing, and seeing what that means for industries and businesses. Maybe mixing AI with it solves problems that otherwise they couldn't have had the affordability to build or even generate the code for. I'd like to see art still kind of hang towards individual creation, or at least the AI tools that are generating art have a lot of iterative capabilities so you can pull the art back out of AI. tweak it, and then put the art back into AI if you need help with that. And that's somewhere it doesn't currently exist. And I think that's also why people shun AI-generated art, is because it feels hollow to some people, or it feels almost like you've turned your back on the artists. My mom was a professional artist, so I understand. It's hard to make a living doing art. It's the first thing they need and the last thing they pay for. And so I see AI making it easier in that way. I just hope it doesn't replace too much, or in the very least, I hope it evolves those artists and programmers and designers, instead of putting them out of work, maybe making new jobs as AI composers, AI architects, AI, I don't know. I like the idea of an AI composer, right? The notion of just standing up in front of an orchestra, right? And... you're creating this music with your hands, right? That's almost like when you're an AI composer, you're creating these prompts and the generative content, you're just like, wow. It's almost like being that one person up in front and having 50 instruments coming back with you with music because of what you're directing them, you know? And so I like that. I think that's, for me, really exciting, really exciting stuff.
[00:23:52.898] Kent Bye: Nice. And is there anything else that's left unsaid or any final thoughts you'd like to share with the broader Emerson community?
[00:23:58.762] Finn Staber: Well, one thing, it's been said before, but Ken, I think what you've done is you've really made a big splash in this industry. So I'd like to thank you. I think your ability to shine a flashlight down a dark hallway, giving people a voice that otherwise would be really hard, don't understand how to work the media. You have a great following of a lot of people that listen and you focus on the good. And I think that deserves a lot of kudos. So thank you.
[00:24:23.738] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it feels like a long overdue conversation we just had here. So thanks for taking the time to share a little bit about your journey in the space and some of the stuff that you're excited about and stuff that you've worked on in the past. And yeah, thanks for joining me here on the podcast to help break down your journey into the space and some of the things that you've done along the way. You know, the I Am Cat and those other games, you know, the baby hands being an inspiration that's in your own way tilted a direction for what has ended up being like some real huge directions in the industry. So yeah. Just thanks again for taking the time to help share a little bit more about your story. So thank you.
[00:24:55.657] Finn Staber: Well, thanks. Thanks to you. I think a takeaway is that if you see the opportunity to help, you have the responsibility. So if you walk past a piece of trash on the side of the road and you leave it, you littered that trash. Unless it's maybe, like, toxic. Then I understand. But, like, if I go to the river and I see a piece of trash, I was always raised, you've got to pick up that trash. If you didn't, you left it there. And so I think that's the same way as if you see somebody in the community that needs help, if you see a partner, if you see just another studio that's struggling, or like you, you see somebody that needs a voice, you have a responsibility to stand up. And so thank you.
[00:25:29.904] Kent Bye: Yeah, thank you. Awesome. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
