The most expensive failures in shooter history weren't accidents. They were predictable.
A game you wanted to love. A weekend you cleared. An hour in, something is wrong and you can't say what. Nothing is broken. The game just stops earning the next minute, and you stop giving it one. That feeling has a structure.
Print + Kindle
Players never arrive empty-handed. They come for one of four promises.
Promise 01: Flow & Pattern Mastery
Put me in the pocket of tight inputs, clear patterns, and instant feedback, and let me chase mastery.
Promise 02: Compete & Be Ranked
Measure my skill against other humans, and tell me exactly where I stand.
Promise 03: Progress & Plunder
Give me something worth chasing past tonight, and make what might drop better than the drop itself.
Promise 04: Jeopardy Through Stakes
Put what I've earned in the line of fire, and let the risk of losing it become the ride.
Every promise carries conditions. The industry inherited every one of them.
Drawing on an analysis of more than one hundred shooters, Table Stakes makes those conditions explicit. Rome built every one of them into the Circus Maximus in stone. An archer looting the field at Agincourt ran the extraction loop six centuries before anyone named it. The titles that endure know which promise they're making. The ones that collapse mistake the mechanic for the meaning.
For players
The words for something you have always been able to feel and never been able to prove.
For developers
The conversation that should happen before launch, not in the post-mortem.
For everyone else
A structural account of why some of the largest budgets in games produced nothing at all.
Read a full case study before anyone else
A post-mortem of a shooter that built everything except the only thing it was selling. Sent as a PDF, immediately.
Erik Heiberg
Erik Heiberg has spent more than a decade in game publishing across console, PC, and mobile, much of it in the rooms where games get greenlit, priced, and killed. He performed the financial diligence that helped bring the Telltale catalog out of bankruptcy and has built demand forecasts and scenario models for AAA shooters in development, evaluated studio and IP acquisitions, and served on greenlight committees.
He currently leads product marketing and player experience at Azra Games. Prior to that he was Head of Global Marketing and Insights at Splash Damage, led growth across three live-service titles at Scopely (WWE Champions, The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, Looney Tunes World of Mayhem), and held brand and franchise roles at 505 Games, DreamWorks, and The Walt Disney Company. Before working in video games he produced 17 television movies of the week and a mini-series for Lifetime, NBC, and Hallmark.
He founded Gamesay, an independent games research publication, where he fielded a monthly national survey on purchase behavior and published quantified post-mortems of major launches. Table Stakes grew out of a pattern he kept encountering from that seat: several of the shooters he worked on never reached a customer. He wanted to know whether that was luck. He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson and lives in Los Angeles.
The conversation that should have happened before launch
Out before the end of 2026 on Amazon, print and Kindle. Be told the day it's live.