Gaming
Gaming
The games developer who failed on Dragon's Den
Chris Kempt tells us what it's really like pitching a game to the Dragons.
Chris Kempt on Dragon's Den
© Red Bull
Want funding for an indie game? Many developers would go straight to Kickstarter. Not Chris Kempt, CEO of Kempt Games. Instead, the chief of the studio behind the Red Bull Kart Fighter series appealed to some of the most famous investors in the UK: Deborah Meaden, Piers Linney, Peter Jones, Duncan Bannatyne and Kelly Hoppen. AKA: The Dragons.
Hoping to secure an investment for his series of stunt games - including driving game Stunt Guy, platformer Stunt Gal, Reg the Roadkill (a sadistic version of Frogger), and BMRex (a T Rex rides a penny farthing) – Kempt made quite an entrance, crashing through a projector screen which had been showing a video of Stunt Guy 2. “Oh my God,” exclaimed a shocked Deborah Meaden, while the rest of the Dragons laughed. Behind the scenes, things were very different, however.
“One thing that the cameras didn’t show was that after I did that there was then a 15 minute period where they cleared up after me,” Chris Kempt tells us. “The cameras were turned off which meant that I just stood there for 15 minutes getting incredibly nervous. The Dragons were just looking at me. Nobody said a word and they were looking at me as if they wanted to kill me. They said: 'go' again: You could hear it on telly that I was really nervous. My voice was quivering when I started to pitch, but then I settled into it.”
Cameras rolling again, he started his pitch, requesting £250,000 for a 25% stake in the business. Still, it was tricky trying to sell the business while the Dragons were engrossed in Stunt Guy 2, a top-down driving game that harks back to retro classics like Spyhunter.
“Duncan Bannatyne was quite quiet throughout the process and the producer told me afterwards that he’d basically just been playing the game the whole time so that was why he wasn’t paying attention.
"They were all squealing and laughing and they clearly enjoyed the game while they were playing it. The great irony is that they were sat there playing a game that they were all clearly enjoying, but they couldn’t see it as an investible proposition. I hope that doesn’t say too much about my business skills.”
If we’re honest, it did fall apart when they put down the game and started talking money. Asked by Peter Jones to name a Kempt game that had made money, Chris told him that the original games that his studio developed have been free. As investors keen on making money, they may have had difficulty understanding the concept of investing in a business which gives away its games for free, albeit with in-app purchases. Chris Kempt wasn’t surprised that they didn’t get it.
“Let’s be honest, I don’t think many game developers understand free to play. I think we’re still learning about it. Many games developers will tell you that they think it’s the worst thing to ever happen to the industry. I can understand why people would have that opinion. The reality is that we live in a world where digital content is perceived as being free, particularly on Android devices.
"It is changing. One of the things we have seen over the last three to six months is increasingly on iOS, there have been a string of premium games. Currently, the only option we have on Android is to make free to play work.
“No, I don’t think the Dragons understood it but anybody who pretends to really understand it at this point is probably lying anyway because it’s changing all the time.”
Yet, as many entrepreneurs have found, appearing on Dragon’s Den has been a good thing for business as 25-30,000 people installed Stunt Guy 2 after the show. “One of the things of Dragon’s Den is that you basically can’t lose because even if you don’t get the investment you get the publicity. As long as you don’t act like a complete twonk. In our case, we are an established games studio, we have released successful games for years. Hopefully there is a degree of credibility there…
“Of course there are questions I wish I’d answered differently. For example, another thing they didn’t show on TV was Peter Jones saying: “What stops me from taking £250,000 and paying someone to make a game for me?" I was really taken aback by that question and I didn’t really have a prepared answer. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing and I said something like: ‘You could try that Peter but you wouldn’t be very successful.’ It takes time to build a team that works together and can build stuff together. Viewing it as a commodity in which you could hire people to build games is a bit naive.”
Stunt Gal
© Kempt Games
Indeed, Chris admits that he would have struggled to work with Peter Jones, Duncan Bannatyne or Kelly Hoppen even if they had offered him the money. He would have relished the opportunity to work with Deborah Meaden or Piers Linney, though.
“Deborah has a strong background in marketing and that’s our biggest challenge. Piers has a very strong background in technology – he’s a reasonably brave investor. Of the five, he tends to make the braver investments. It would have required someone to have a bit of a vision for it and a little bit of bravery. It wasn’t the end of the world when I didn’t get the investment. We’ve carried on with the plan regardless.”
