Clad in virtual reality goggles, professional gamers are fending off real-life obstacles every day from inside a software development studio in south Sarasota County. The fast-growing company, in Nokomis, is also experiencing explosive growth in in payroll, user base and more.
Founded in 2022, the company, Combat Waffle Studios, has three video games currently available: Ghosts of Tabor, Grim and Silent North. They are primarily survival-themed virtual reality (VR) titles that players can find on gaming platforms Steam VR, Meta Quest and Pico.
The company’s founder Scott Albright has a backstory worthy of some of the intricate games the company makes. It includes a four-year stint in the U.S. Army overseas; the unusual name of the business stems from his military experience. It also includes working as a talent agent, and, of course, playing video games.
In overseeing his company’s rapid growth, Albright is leaning on some valuable business lessons. Among them: adapting quickly, like when he turned a corporate threat into an opportunity, and hiring to stay ahead of demand.
Ghosts of Tabor, a first-person extraction shooter game, is the company’s most popular game. It was released in March 2023 and surpassed 1 million users in May, when it also made its debut on PlayStation.
While Albright, who is also CEO and creative director of the company, declines to disclose Combat Waffle revenue, he confirms Ghosts of Tabor grossed more than $30 million as of May, a little more than two years after its release.
Two other games are in development, with releases expected in the end of 2026 and 2027, respectively, according to Albright, who notes the timeframes are flexible.
Growing need
Combat Waffle Studios has more than 50 employees as of June, and it plans to grow to 100 by the second quarter of 2026 as it develops its new games, according to Albright. The company employs a combination of remote and in-person workers, including some contractors.
In February, the gaming company relocated after outgrowing its former 7,000-square-foot space on Triple Diamond Boulevard. With its new digs up the street, the company more than tripled its footprint: the building at 195 Triple Diamond Blvd. where it is located now, spans 23,349 square feet. The space is the former home of Tervis, a drinkware manufacturer that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2024. Tervis moved its headquarters to Osprey when it emerged from bankruptcy earlier this year.
Moving Combat Waffle Studios was necessary to accommodate both operations and personnel, Albright says. At the top of the list of concerns? More power.
“If we plugged a new computer in, another computer would turn off,” Albright says of the previous office. During an interview on the second floor of the new building in Nokomis, he says: “This place is rated to run heavy-duty machinery, so we could plug computers in all day. We’ll never use it all. I think we’re barely using like 10% of its capacity right now.”
Scott Albright is the founder, CEO and creative director for Combat Waffle Studios, based in Nokomis where Tervis used to be.
The previous location also lacked enough parking and bathrooms to accommodate his staff, according to Albright. Employees had to park off-site, and the company purchased scooters for them to use so they could get from the satellite parking area to work.
Most employees come from Port Charlotte, which is south, or Lakewood Ranch, which is to the north. So the Nokomis office makes sense because it is located between the two, Albright says.
In addition to power, parking and bathrooms, Albright wanted his employees to have space. The new headquarters has privacy pods coming, and it features an outdoor courtyard for gatherings, an indoor basketball area and a green room where the company produces videos and trailers.
Fun at the office mirrors the company’s origin story. For years, Albright had been playing competitive VR games. “I was on the No. 1 team in the world called the Leftovers, and we played a specific game called Contractors,” Albright says. “All of us on the team always wanted a game like Ghosts of Tabor … and developers just weren’t making it.”
Companies were not developing the game because there was too much infrastructure required, Albright says.
“But I met somebody through a friend that was an investor, and he gave us an initial $1.2 [million],” says Albright, to develop Ghosts of Tabor. “I kept full possession of my company. He got profit shares, and 11 months later, we debuted the game to the world.”
Prior to Combat Waffle and after his stint in the Army, where he was injured, Albright was a talent agent. He was managing careers for his clients and attending events like ComicCon when the pandemic hit. His job was deemed nonessential.
“I got an entire year at home with my little girl,” says Albright, who has a 1.5-year-old and 5-year-old with his wife and a 14-year-old who lives with the boy’s mother out of state. Once things began opening up following the pandemic, Albright was able to start doing conventions and signings again.
But he felt like he was missing out at home.
That led Albright to decide to make his passion his vocation.
Industry headwinds
The growth at Combat Waffle Studios, meanwhile, is notable in an industry seeing declines.
“VR and gaming period is in a pretty bad state,” Albright says, noting several studios have gone out of business this year and “there are a lot of people from flat screen gaming to VR gaming losing their jobs.”
Ghosts of Tabor is the most popular game developed by Combat Waffle Studios in Nokomis.
To cite one example of the challenges: California-based Electronic Arts Inc. laid off 300 to 400 people in April and canceled a game it was supposed to release, according to Bloomberg News.
Summer, in particular, can be difficult, according to Albright.
“We call it the summer slump, where you watch sales just sort of tank, because everyone’s going outside,” Albright says. “There’s been a lot of decline this summer compared to others.”
Another challenge facing the industry comes from those embedded in the gaming world.
“There’s a big problem in video games around the world, in every spectrum of gaming, from VR to flat-screen, and it’s cheating,” Albright says. “You’ve got a lot of bad actors that want to make hacks and cheats for games to get an advantage or just ruin other people’s time.”
Combat Waffle Studios is combating this problem.
“We knew who our two bad actors were that were the biggest problems, and we hired them,” Albright says, to figure out how to stop cheating. The company has now developed a product called Tomahawk that offers an anti-cheat solution for standalone VR headsets.
“What we’ve done is we’ve effectively stopped 100% of cheaters” on Meta playing Ghosts of Tabor, Albright says. “We’re currently building our back-end infrastructure out for our customer portal, and then we will start promoting this to other studios for use.”
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