The short version
Mistfall Hunter was developed by Bellring Games and published by Skystone Games, and it runs on Unreal Engine. Two of those three are on the Steam listing; the third the developer let slip while apologising for stutter. The part worth knowing beyond the credits is the asymmetry between the two companies: this is Bellring's first and only game, while Skystone has published nine before it — and Skystone was co-founded by David Brevik, who led the original Diablo at Blizzard North.
A first-time studio does not usually ship this
Bellring Games announced Mistfall Hunter on 17 October 2024 at the Xbox Partner Preview, and its own announcement boilerplate is the only first-party description of the studio anywhere: "an emerging studio dedicated to gamers around the world. Its first project, Mistfall Hunter, is an upcoming extraction looter set in a dark, mysterious fantasy world." No release or interview from the studio gives a country, a team size or a founding year, so the pages that print one are guessing — though the trademark register does say who owns the name, which is set out below.
- What a first game does not usually include: a simultaneous PC, PS5 and Xbox launch, five server countries, crossplay, and an in-house kernel-level anti-cheat driver the Steam listing names as "Bellring Anti-Cheat".
- It also explains a good deal of the launch. The stutter, the region split and the Fatal Error wave are the failure modes of shipping a live multiplayer game for the first time, and the developer replies read that way.
The name on the publisher is the interesting one
Skystone Games was founded in 2020 by Bill Wang, a former Perfect World Entertainment executive who is its CEO, and David Brevik, its president and executive producer — co-founder of Blizzard North and the lead on the original Diablo. It is based in Belmont, California. Mistfall Hunter is its tenth release and by a distance its largest: the nine before it are small independent titles like HELLCARD, Undying and Tiny Bookshop, none of which is the scale of a multiplayer extraction game with three platform launches on one day. Brevik described the company's intent at founding as working closely with young studios rather than throwing money at them — which, next to a first-time developer shipping this, is context rather than trivia.
The engine, and how to confirm it without taking our word for it
It is Unreal Engine, and the confirmation is first-party but indirect: DevNote #7 lists "loading stutters caused by Unreal Engine shader precompilation" among the problems resolved before launch. That is Bellring naming the engine in passing, while discussing something else, which is a more reliable form of confirmation than a marketing line. Anyone can check it independently — Unreal names its crash reports UE-<ProjectName>, and every fatal-error thread on this game quotes the string UE-MistfallHunter. What is not published is the version. One technical write-up states Unreal 5.4 and attaches a Lumen and Nanite readout, no first-party source names any version, and no second outlet repeats it independently, so this page records that claim rather than adopting it.
- If you arrived here from a crash rather than curiosity, the version number will not help and the fix list will: the performance page carries the six steps a developer posted in a forum reply and nowhere else.
Who owns the name: the trademark register
The studio has never said where it is based, but its name is on a public register, and that is the closest thing to an answer that exists. On the US trademark register, BELLRING GAMES (Reg. 8064932) and MISTFALL HUNTER (Reg. 8036847) are both owned by Lemon Inc., a corporation organised in the Cayman Islands. The Bellring mark was filed on 21 October 2024, four days after the game was revealed, and registered on 16 December 2025; the game's own name was filed six weeks earlier and registered on 25 November 2025. Lemon Inc. is a ByteDance subsidiary — ByteDance describes it that way in its own 2022 WIPO filing, and TechCrunch reported the same independently. So the name of the studio and the name of the game are both held inside ByteDance's corporate group.
- What the register does not tell you: where the team works, how many people it has, or how the studio itself is owned. A trademark holder is a legal entity, not an office, and a Cayman Islands address is where the company is organised rather than where anyone sits.
- The claims in circulation, graded: "Hong Kong" (a studio database and a Reddit thread) and "a Chinese studio" (a LinkedIn post) are inferences nobody sources. Baidu Baike names a Shenzhen company as the parent; it is one user-edited entry, so it is recorded here as unverified rather than repeated as fact.
- Nothing here changes who you are dealing with as a player. The Steam listing still credits Bellring Games as developer and Skystone Games as publisher, and those are the two names on support, anti-cheat and the store.