In this episode of the EUVC podcast, Andreas speaks with Maitham Mohamed, CEO of Material10.

Andreas and Maitham explore the rapid evolution of the gaming industry, discussing innovative business models and unique approaches to monetization that are reshaping consumer engagement worldwide. Maitham shares his journey to founding Material10 in 2022, highlighting his mission to revolutionize mass-market gaming with a free-to-play model that aims to drive sustained player engagement while building a new revenue framework.

At Material10, Maitham leads a lean team of 10 from the company’s headquarters in the United Kingdom, backed by €2.5 million in funding. With a focus on the global mass-market gaming audience, Material10 is positioning itself as a disruptive player in the gaming space, delivering immersive experiences that appeal to a broad demographic and challenging traditional B2C models.

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✍️ Show notes

What inspired you to start Material10?

* My background is all over the place but i started my company when i was about 19yo. For me, it all started during COVID which was supposed to be when i did my A-levels (entry style exam for university) and because of COVID, Boris Johnson decided to cancel them and gave everyone “generated grades”. Effectively they had an algo based on what they think you might’ve gotten based on some inputs including how you did on your mock exams. I was pretty unserious through the year and my whole thing was pulling through in the last moment, but this time it fully got cancelled and i didn’t get into the university i was supposed to go to.

* After that, i thought my life was over bcos i didn’t get into one of those “target universities” that you needed to go to for investment banking, which is where everyone in London wants to go to. Ended up using that as motivation to grind very hard and somehow managed to start working at a boutique investment bank in London. Did that for a bit before realising investment banking probably wasn’t for me. Moved into big tech, was a Product Manager at Amazon — great people but the work was too granular and felt too zoomed in. I had always been working on side projects and that’s when i started to take startups more seriously, ended up working at this DeFi protocol called OlympusDAO which was creating these radically new economic systems, something i was always fascinated with. That ended up going from zero to $4B+ in a year, this was during the crazy crypto cycle around 2021. It was an incredible experience for me, both for learning and getting quite deep into crypto / startups. Then ended up working with this Series A, Web3 gaming startup before moving on and starting Material10.

* Material10 started bcos of my addiction to FIFA Ultimate Team when i was young. I used to be a semi-pro esports player many years ago, mainly competing in local tournaments in London. Everyone wanted the best players — Ronaldo, Messi, Neymar, Kaka, etc, and so did i. You mainly got these from either opening these packs where you had a random probability of getting good players, or through buying it on the marketplace through FIFA coins.

* For both options, you needed to spend ALOT of money. My parents had already bought me the base game for £50-60 and there was no way they were going to give me 100s to blow on opening packs (or loot boxes as they’re known in gaming). Lucky for me, FIFA had a vibrant ingame economy where players used to trade millions of items with each other. I ended up just trading the markets to make the coins i needed — you could literally apply fairly sophisticated strategies to these markets and scrape FIFA coins from flips, arbitrages, thematic investments, etc. Somehow ended up trading my way to having millions of coins to buy my favourite player (which at the time was Neymar). There was also these shady grey markets where you could sell these coins for real money too.

* This all led me to starting Material10, where what we’re doing is based on the premise of integrating these grey markets into the actual game will lead to something incredibly powerful. There are these grey markets that exist all across many popular multiplayer games and there’s an estimated $10-20B of grey market trading, players REALLY seem to be able to do this within games.

What’s one thing most people misunderstand about Material10?

* We’re working on a fresh unique video game and also a new business model powered by a player-driven open economy. Many people like both but feel maybe there’s too many risk to having this unique business model / economy AND having a fresh game. To some extent, i agree but they’re fundamentally inseparable.

* The types of games that have the capacity to have these deep ingame economies with billions of dollars in trading volume, will be competitive multiplayer games that are sometimes dubbed ‘forever games’ e.g. Fortnite, World of Warcraft, CSGO, etc. Those games are called “forever games” for a reason — something like 92% of ALL playtime every year goes to old games.

* If you want to have a competitive chance at creating one of these games, even for the sake of creating these vibrant economies, the game you make needs to be fundamentally fresh and unique. We’ve seen many attempts, just this year, to create these big competitive multiplayer games and almost all have failed because they were only iteratively unique — few tweaks, maybe a new gimmick or so, but nothing that pushes game design / the core gameplay experience fundamentally. They don’t survive long enough for the economy / business model to even matter.

* Good example of this is Concord, they spent around $200-400M to create a new hero shooter, nothing that unique / special but very high production value. They shut the game down and refunded everyone, i believe in less than 2 weeks after launch. That is insane.

Was there a specific 'aha moment' that led to founding Material10?

* I was sold on the idea of having open economies in video games from the literal first 10 seconds of hearing about it bcos of my background in gaming (FIFA, etc).

* But the inflection point after learning about web3 / open economy gaming and then deciding i personally need to start a gaming company was when i tried to find these games to play (because i was so excited that this concept is a real thing) — and to my dismay, all the games that incorporated this concept were terrible from a gameplay standpoint.

What big problem are you solving, and why does it matter right now?

* We want to create the most sticky game ever. We now live in the “brain rot” era where it’s insanely hard to first, win attention, then to keep it. People increasingly have low attention spans, low focus and there’s a need for constant dopamine.

* It has espc manifested in gaming where players want high dopamine games with frequent reward cycles. It’s why we’ve seen the decline of RTS games, reduced session lengths of overall games & shorter / no cutscenes in RPG games now.

* Most of the top competitive multiplayer games (”forever games”) are from the pre brain rot era and whilst players love these games, there is an opportunity to create a new shooter experience that adheres to the modern player needs.

How is your solution different from existing solutions? Why hasn’t someone else done this?

* We’re working on a competitive multiplayer shooter game. Competitive multiplayer live service games are the only ones in gaming that tend to have power law venture outcomes e.g. League of Legends from Riot, Clash of Clans / Clash Royale from Supercell, etc. Mainly bcos they’re infinitely replayable bcos players playing against each other is the content itself, no two game sessions are the same (if the game is designed well).

* The game we’re working on is called Project Fallen — it’s a new type of shooter game, 1v1 — me vs you. Both players control 5 squads, each made up of x1 commander & x4 soldiers. Both players start with their squads at opposite sides of the map and storm across the map trying to kill each other to capture parts of the map to extract resources from it.

* The very core & addictive element of it is this ability to hotswap between your squads in third-person shooter mode. You can easily jump from Squad 1 to Squad 2 to Squad 3, very rapidly.

* It essentially creates a very high action, intense gameplay experience where you’re constantly jumping between squads depending on where you’re needed the most. Maybe you’re jumping between a heavy squad with grenade launchers clearing the left flank, before moving into a sniper squad trying to clear a pathway for another squad.

* The idea is to have no boring moments.

* Beyond that, we’re also leveraging web3 — the way i think about web3 in this context is like pouring gasoline on a fire.

* As i mentioned previously, there are these multi-billion dollar grey markets that exist in gaming. Players want to trade ingame items with each other for real money. Whilst there are some basic tools to try integrate them on web2 tech, web3 is really what can really make it work.

* We’re going to have this completely player-driven economy, everything from cosmetics to power items. There’s only one game that has really done this, which is EVE Online, it’s a space simulation game that has been around for almost 25 years. B...