[6] Duelyst development was led by Keith Lee, a former lead producer at Blizzard Entertainment, who co-founded Counterplay Games.

Duelyst was designed to accommodate short play sessions, a game lasting around ten minutes on average.

[9] The game entered open beta testing in October 2015, and was released in April 2016 on both Microsoft Windows and OS X platforms.

[17] Originally self-published, it was announced in July 2017 that the game would henceforth be published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, who would take on responsibilities for marketing and customer support.

[18][19] Counterplay announced in January 2020 that due to declining player counts, the online servers for Duelyst will be shut down on February 27, 2020 at 3PM PST, and the game will become unplayable after that.