Angry ‘Marvel Snap’ Developer Finding New Publisher After TikTok Ban Fiasco

One of the weirdest side-effects of the temporary TikTok ban that lasted about 16 hours until parent company ByteDance said they believed incoming President Donald Trump would forestall the law, was that the ByteDance-published mobile game, Marvel Snap, also went offline, along with a few others.

While TikTok flipped its switch and turned back on rather quickly, Marvel Snap took more than entire day to get up and running again, and there are remaining issues with the game’s shop as we speak. Marvel Snap’s developer, Second Dinner, was not at all told that this shutdown was happening, according to them, and when it happened its higher-ups like Ben Brode were even recommending VPNs to get around the ban.

Now, an understandably angry Second Dinner is promising this won’t happen in the future, and to ensure that, they’re in the market for a new publisher. Their official statement from late Monday night:

“MARVEL SNAP is back online in the U.S. But to make sure this NEVER happens again, we’re working to bring more services in-house and partner with a new publisher. This is the start of a new era for MARVEL SNAP.

We know this probably leaves you with even more questions than answers. We appreciate your patience, but in the meantime enjoy playing MARVEL SNAP.

We’ll continue to update with more information as soon as possible!”

It’s still not fully clear how all this happened. ByteDance was supposed to be divesting itself from its gaming arm, Nuverse, a long time ago, but it’s clear now that never fully happened and they were in fact still pulling the strings with Snap, including having the ability to unilaterally take it offline. To avoid that, Second Dinner is trying to extract itself from all this, but we don’t know how long that will be or what form it will take.

It remains to be seen if this craziness might boost Marvel Snap’s fortunes with all the attention, though I’ve heard some players now wary of spending money on microtransactions within the game if this is something that can simply be turned off with no notice. Though a new publisher is supposed to solve that issue. Snap’s playercount was already declining through most of 2024, at least where we can measure the exact numbers on Steam, so we’ll see where it goes from here. It’s hard to blame Second Dinner for wanting to run as far away from its current publisher as it can after all this.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.