While the shutdown of one of the most-used social media apps in America, TikTok, is all anyone can talk about right now, an underreported aspect of the story is that this applies to all apps from its parent company, ByteDance. This includes things like the video editing app CapCut, but as gamers learned late on Sunday, it also includes…Marvel Snap?
Marvel Snap is a digital card game developed by Second Dinner, so how did it catch a stray here? Well, ByteDance was the publisher of Marvel Snap. There was a somewhat ugly situation back in 2023 when ByteDance divested from its gaming Nuverse subsidiary as part of a “restructure” of its gaming business. However, Marvel Snap has continued to operate since then, despite ByteDance’s exit, but it seems they are still technically be the publisher in order for this to be happening.
But whatever is going on here, they took Snap offline ahead of the company ban with these other apps, despite supposedly getting out of the gaming business. When players try to log in, they are greeted with a nearly-identical message that TikTokers are being shown which reads:
“Sorry MARVEL SNAP isn’t available right now.
A law banning MARVEL SNAP has been enacted in the US. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use MARVEL SNAP for now. Rest assured, we’re working to restore our service in the US.”
Unlike a variant of the TikTok message, there is no mention of incoming President Donald Trump, who ByteDance believes will work out a deal with them to get TikTok back online in the US. And if that happens, then all these other apps would repopulate including Marvel Snap, presumably.
It’s a deeply strange situation as most players probably didn’t know ByteDance had anything to do with Marvel Snap, as the face of the game is the California-based studio Second Dinner. Again, ByteDance supposedly divested from Nuverse and Snap, but it’s still tangled up in the web somehow.
I’m currently looking into other games that may be affected by this ban, based on Nuverse or other ByteDance subsidiary projects. Some of those games like Warhammer 40,000: Lost Crusade have already shut down, and Marvel Snap so far seems like the highest profile game to catch a stray from this whole situation.
Essentially if TikTok comes back, Marvel Snap comes back. It’s an additionally complicated situation because it was easy to spend dozens, hundreds or even thousands of dollars on Snap if you were a big enough fan, and now that’s just…gone? While TikTok is the biggest story here, certainly, this is a thoroughly unexpected and bizarre development in the gaming world, and we’ll be tracking it as it continues to unfold.
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