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. But it’s a space sim game and we want todo this in a modern competitive shooter.
Beyond that, we also decided to use this economy to create a whole new business model that solves the core problems in free-to-play gaming currently. The best example of a free-to-play is Fortnite. The game is free and you can play as much as you want but you have to pay money for the ingame items, that is known as microtransactions. Most people don’t but there’s about 5% of the players that do which drives the $150B+ F2P gaming market.
But the business model has been around for 10+ years and in gaming there tends to be a new business model in these 10-12 year cycles — we moved from packaged goods to online premium to subscription to now, F2P. The core problem with it has always been hyperagressive monetisation — game publishers constantly trying to shove microtransactions down players throats because there’s this constant tension between content / game experience that is given away for free vs game content that is monetised.
With our model. what we do is give everything away for “free” and the way we make money is simply by taxing player-to-player trade. Because of this player driven economy there will be these gigantic volumes which we tax and we think we’ll walk away with even more money than F2P. It’s effectively a new marketplace style business model. I still need a cool new name for it.
What real proof do you have that this is a need in the market?
With the economy / business model — that’s easy to validate, players are already trading items for real money despite it being against T&Cs in games like WoW, Runescape, FIFA, etc. The estimated figures are something like $10-20B in volume, imagine how big volumes would be if it was actually allowed and integrated into the core experience.
For the game, bcos game development is done over 2-3 years and sometimes longer for AAA games, it often relies on a combo of looking at comparables in the market having groups of players that you playtest early iterations with. For us, there was a game called Helldivers 2 that came out.
What does the product look like today? Walk us through a typical user experience with Material10.
So development cycles for PC / console video games are fairly long, anywhere from 2/3yrs to 10+ years with a game like Star Citizen and other MMOs.
We started the company around early to mid 2022 but we spent alot of time trying different game ideas, mechanics, systems, etc before finding the one we knew was the one.
That was around 7-8mo ago, we quickly put together a multiplayer MVP and playtested it with 40-50 players including some esports players around 5mo ago with truly overwhelmingly positive response.
So since then we’ve double downed and are looking at closing up pre-production of the game by EOY. This means almost having our first game map complete alongside
So since then we’ve double down, started pouring in more content (systems, features, ingredients) and really improving the 3Cs (character, camera, control) — the core systems & mechanics of the game. Alongside hoping to almost complete the first map in our game, which is Giza after a massive climate catastrophe.
Where do you see Material10 in five to ten years? What’s the dream outcome here?
To create the most sticky games ever — with open economies the size of small nations. Where players are driving these economies wholly, creating value for each other, spending huge amounts of their time in these worlds bcos it’s a core part of their life that makes them happy & fulfils them.
Games really have the potential to create some of the best friendships ever, including even finding your potential partner. Through having a very sticky video game where players want to spend all their because it’s fun, whilst also having an open economy where players can create value — there’s almost no need to not spend most of your time engaging in what you love.
What’s been the hardest part of building the product to meet user needs?
Finding the fun. There’s the fundamental question of, is the core gameplay experience fun. There’s the second question of, will enough people find this fun — which in our case is viral growth and millions of players.
What KPIs or metrics do you prioritize at Material10?
At the stage where we’re at in development, which is closing “pre-production”. What we’re mainly looking at is — is the core playtesting group that we’ve put together enjoying the experience, what are some of the things that is holding it back from being an even more enjoyable experience, etc. Very qualitative at this stage.
As you approach alpha, beta, early access, launch & live service — there’s alot more questions around retention, churn, ARPU, session length, etc. Similar to a typical consumer product but with a few more dimensions.
Customer validation.
We play tested our MVP with a group of 40-50 players and we have overwhelmingly positive response.
Also, tested out our world / IP in some indie gaming subreddits and it did really well for that subreddit size. Almost 100K+ views, 100s of organic comments, etc.
Who are your biggest competitors, and what’s your advantage over them?
At a high level, almost everything “entertainment” that sucks in attention (movies, tv shows, social media, etc) but more specifically within the gaming market it’s generally the top competitive multiplayer shooter games e.g. Fortnite, CSGO, CoD, Valorant, etc
Main advantage is that we’re creating something fundamentally fresh where we’re not competing directly with any of these games i.e. the best way to compete with Fortnite is to… just not. If you created another Battle Royale, FPS, Hero Shooter, etc you’re going head to head against very established incumbents that will eat you alive because they’ve spent literally billions of dollars developing the game, the content within it alongside existing social systems and network effects. The only way to “unstick” players from these games is to offer them something that they can’t get anywhere else which is also incredibly compelling (fun) and then sticky.
Are there emerging trends in the market that could impact Material10?
AI is pretty interesting for game development / production — where game development cycles can be crunched MASSIVELY but the tech isn’t there yet for that. There’s some stuff around AI agents too that could be useful around QA, more dynamic NPCs, narratives, etc. Alot of the same run of the mill AI applications to gaming.
What are some potential risks or challenges you foresee in the industry?
AI gets so good at both mimicing humans (hard to detect) and mechanically so good (already kinda there), that cheating (which is already rampant) is impossible to keep out. Could potentially destroy multiplayer gaming.
How much have you raised, and what are you looking to raise next?
We’ve raised about $2.5M, likely looking at raising another $5-10M.
How are you allocating the funds raised, and what are the next big priorities for Material10?
All of the capital is going towards development now. There are so many things that go into developing a game — design, engineering, art, animation, vfx, quality assurance, etc.
What qualities or values do you look for in investors?
Real sophistication and unique experience / insight when it comes to a core part of could make or break the company — the three core pillars for me are (1) web3/virtual economics (2) game publishing (3) game development. Hence why between us the three co-founders, each one has expertise in one of them.
How big is the team, and what’s your approach to building culture at Material10?
Team is around 9-10 people now, think like every other startup we want the most talented people, that work incredibly hard and are fundamentally good humans.
Beyond that, something i’ve been reflecting on alot and that we’ve been fortunate to build within the company is the idea of asymmetry. Group of people that have the core technical and intellectual competencies but are incredibly asymmetric. Haven’t fully teased the idea out yet but it’s vaguely it’s…
People that have undiscovered potentiality where perhaps their old company was underutilising them but within the span of a few months, their capacities have just becoming so much wider.
Those that have deep knowledge of the fundamentals i.e. of player psychology, the fundamentals of fun, fundamentals of narrative / storytelling — where their theories are often more correct than not and can either save time or get the product to a state where we couldn’t have possibly imagined (in a good way).
Taste / intuition — kinda tied to the second point but knowledge and taste / intuition are kinda different. Knowledge can come from intuition but can also come from hard earned experience. Intuition specifically, as far as i can tell, can’t be taught. It’s another extension of fundamentals where having intuition makes you so asymmetric.
I think it has a real impact on culture, there’s this deep trust in each other to not only handle your area bcos game development is so wide — but also in each others capacity to fill gaps within the company’s skillset. Anyway this is all a working theory.
What key roles are you looking to fill next, and what’s your ideal candidate?
Mainly engineers and artists.
What’s one lesson you’ve learned in this journey that you wish you’d known earlier?
I have one that is both separate but tied. Knowing your space better than most people before you start to be able to create a thesis (with set of hypothesis for each funding round) that can be invalidated.
Typical SV advice is to “just start” and figure it out but i see so many people rowing in the wrong direction for months / years simply because they didn’t have the knowledge.
There are these two modes of being — reflection / thinking and action / execution. You need todo both but you can’t simultaneously do both. Reflection is where you set the thesis but that’s generally predicated on having an ocean of knowledge within the domain you’re pursuing and a thesis that is rooted in some sort of edge, which is often developed if you have the ocean of knowledge to find gaps in.
Execution risk is real but thesis risk is even more real.
Hot or not: Remote work for startups?
Depends on industry, for gaming specifically yes — for broader consumer no.
If you could acquire any company right now, who would it be?
It would either be Steam (best game distribution) or Epic Games (best game engine, Unreal Engine 5, along with the most popular game ever, Fortnite).
What has surprised you the most about being a founder?
What Ben Horowitz describes as the struggle, particularly when the times are dark — there are insanely hard moments where “food loses its taste” and the sheer amount of strength it takes to go through it. This doesn’t mean you won’t fall into it again but if you got through it once, you generally know you can get through it again and that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
What’s your biggest piece of advice for founders just starting out?
Tied to my founder lesson — just know your space better than most and develop a rigorous thesis that can be invalidated.
Where can people learn more or follow Material10?
Can connect with my on LinkedIn (Maitham Mohamed) or follow us on twitter @PlayMaterial10.
Any parting thoughts or predictions for the next five years in tech?
We already somewhat have this in games like Runescape, WoW, Roblox or even Axie Infinity. But think we’ll have video games where people will be able to spend all their time within these worlds and earn a livelihood — at scale.
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