‘Marvel Snap’ is now banned in the US, a bizarre link to the TikTok shutdown

While 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 video editing app CapCut, but as gamers learned late Sunday, it also includes…Marvel Snap?

Marvel Snap is a digital card game developed by Second Dinner, so how did it get astray here? Well, ByteDance was the publisher of Marvel Snap. There was a somewhat ugly situation back in 2023 when ByteDance divested its gaming subsidiary Nuverse as part of a “restructuring” of its gaming business. However, Marvel Snap has continued to operate since then, despite ByteDance’s exit, but it looks like they’re still technically the publisher for this to happen.

But whatever’s going on here, they took Snap offline ahead of the company’s ban with these other apps, despite supposedly getting out of the gaming business. When players try to log in, they are greeted with an almost identical message about TikTokers being displayed, which reads:

“Sorry, MARVEL SNAP is not available right now.

A law banning MARVEL SNAP has been passed in the United States. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use MARVEL SNAP right now. Rest assured, we are working to restore our service in the US.”

Unlike a variant of the TikTok announcement, there is no mention of President-elect Donald Trump, who ByteDance believes will strike a deal with them to bring TikTok back online in the US. And if that happens, all these other apps will probably be repopulated including Marvel Snap.

It’s a deeply strange situation, since most players probably didn’t know that ByteDance had anything to do with Marvel Snap, since the face of the game is the Californian studio Second Dinner. Again, ByteDance reportedly divested from Nuverse and Snap, but it’s still entangled in the web somehow.

I am currently investigating other games that may be affected by this ban, based on Nuverse or other ByteDance sub-projects. Some of these games like Warhammer 40,000: Lost Crusade have already been shut down, and Marvel Snap so far seems like the highest profile game to catch a stray from this whole situation.

If TikTok comes back, Marvel Snap comes back. It’s a further complicated situation because it was easy to spend tens, hundreds, or even thousands of dollars on Snap if you were a big enough fan, and now it’s just…gone? While TikTok is the biggest story here, this is certainly a completely unexpected and bizarre development in the gaming world, and we’ll be following it as it continues to unfold.

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