Mountaintop Studios

Mountaintop Studios was an independent video game developer founded in 2020 that built online multiplayer games, described by the company as titles "for players who crave a challenge." Its team was assembled from veterans of Oculus, Naughty Dog, Respawn, Double Fine, Epic, Blizzard, Riot, Bungie, Infinity Ward, Ubisoft, Raven, Turtle Rock, PopCap and Hidden Path, and it operated as a distributed, remote-first organization. Sources place its headquarters variously in San Francisco and Los Angeles/West Hollywood, California.

The studio spent roughly three years developing a player-versus-player tactical shooter, which shipped in September 2024 as Spectre Divide, a free-to-play 3v3 tactical shooter whose central mechanic gave each player control of two bodies. The game drew approximately 400,000 players and a peak of about 10,000 concurrent players across platforms, but engagement and revenue declined; a Season 1 relaunch with a console release on February 25, 2025 peaked at just over 1,000 concurrents on Steam.

Mountaintop announced its closure on March 12-13, 2025, stating it had exhausted its capital and had unsuccessfully pursued a publisher, additional investment and an acquisition. Spectre Divide was scheduled to be taken offline within 30 days, with purchases disabled and post-Season 1 spending refunded.

Founding story

Nate Mitchell, a co-founder and VP of Product at Oculus who stayed through Facebook's 2014 acquisition and led VR product at Meta until leaving in 2019, founded Mountaintop in 2020 with former Oculus creative director Mark Terrano, Matt Hansen (former Double Fine COO and Oculus executive producer), and artist Rich Lyons (Naughty Dog, Vigil). The founders said the studio was motivated both by opportunities they saw in the competitive shooter genre and by a desire to build a people-first, crunch-free studio culture. TechCrunch noted at launch that all four founders were white men and that the team declined to make specific diversity commitments.

Business model

Mountaintop operated as an independent, venture-backed game development studio, self-funding development of its own original online multiplayer titles rather than working under a publisher. Its debut title, Spectre Divide, was released free-to-play, with revenue dependent on in-game purchases; the studio also disabled purchases and refunded spending from the Season 1 period at shutdown.

Free-to-play monetization of Spectre Divide through in-game purchases. One aggregator source cites $12 million in reported revenue, though this figure is not corroborated by primary reporting. The studio stated at closure that incoming revenue was insufficient to cover day-to-day costs of the game and studio.

Traction

Spectre Divide attracted roughly 400,000 players and a peak of about 10,000 concurrent players across all platforms after its September 2024 launch, but the February 25, 2025 Season 1 and console launch peaked at just over 1,000 concurrents on Steam and declined thereafter. The studio raised a reported $5.5M seed, a $30M Series A, and a further $20.5M disclosed in an SEC filing; aggregator sources cite totals ranging from $35M to $86M.

Latest developments

Mountaintop Studios announced on March 12-13, 2025 that it was shutting down after Spectre Divide failed to reach sustainable player numbers and revenue. The studio said it was out of funding, would close at the end of that week, and would take Spectre Divide offline within about 30 days while refunding purchases made since the Season 1 launch.