Marvel Snap Caught In A Trap
At midnight EST on January 19th, social media app TikTok was voluntarily taken offline by publisher ByteDance and delisted from app stores in the US hours before a ban went into effect. This follows a congressional ruling in May that gave the company nine months to find an American buyer or be banned (divest-or-ban). Steadfast in their convictions, they accepted the ban and went offline.
For all of twelve hours.
By noon TikTok was back online thanking “President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to…Americans” (Biden was still in office). On the 20th, Trump (who got the ban ball rolling in 2020, claiming he feared the Chinese app could “impair national security”) signed an executive order giving the app a 75-day reprieve. But this is not an article about the propaganda politics of the TikTok ban – you can find one of those under every rock right about now – no, this is about Marvel Snap.
Marvel Snap is a popular competitive deck-builder where players collect cards based on Marvel Comics characters to compete against one another. Packed with microtransactions and Steve Rogers, it’s as American as apple pie but had the misfortune of being published by Nuverse, a subsidiary of Bytedance.
Apple’s statement on ByteDance’s apps being delisted “[p]ursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” included all applications from ByteDance, including Marvel Snap. Even though TikTok was reinstated hours after the ban, the Snap team were “actively working” to get it back up for days. According to readers of Game File, the PC version of the game was also affected by Trump’s publicity stunt.
Publisher Nuverse and developer Second Dinner were blindsided by the ban, with their social media statement calling it a “surprise” and Chief Development Officer Ben Brode not-not saying players should use a VPN to continue playing “as long as you pretend you're from Canada or something”.
Marvel Snap came back online in the US at 21:53 EST, January 20th and fellow ByteDance apps Lemon8 and CapCut came back with it. Why these three apps took longer to come back online in the US is unclear, especially considering the voluntary nature of the outage in the first place. At present, none of ByteDance’s apps have been reinstated on Apple’s App Store.
In the wake of this, Second Dinner have announced that they “are looking to bring more services in-house and partner with a new publisher” and promise a “new era” for the game. Considering the anti-Chinese sentiment that led to the bans, it is ironic that a game by an American company that uses American characters with art largely from American artists would be one of the apps hit hardest.
This article was originally published as part of my games newsletter on 25/1/25.
