‘Marvel Snap’ developer wasn’t told it would be banned, VPN advises

If the fact that Marvel Snap was banned and taken offline in the US along with the TikTok ban wasn’t weird enough, the story has taken an even weirder turn.

Many players were furious with Second Dinner, the US-based developer of Marvel Snap, that there was no warning about this and nothing about how in-game purchases would simply disappear when the game was taken offline. Well, there’s a good reason for that, Second Dinner wasn’t told about this move by parent company ByteDance at all.

Marvel Snap’s official account posted this on Twitter following the ban:

“Unfortunately, MARVEL SNAP is temporarily unavailable in US app stores and is not available to play in the US

This outage is a surprise to us and was not planned. MARVEL SNAP isn’t going anywhere.

We are actively working to get the game up as soon as possible and will update you when we have more to share.”

Ben Brode, Marvel Snaps’ Chief Development Officer, actually recommends that players use a VPN that can make it look like you’re playing from Canada to temporarily bypass the ban.

All this happens because all ByteDance apps are going offline thanks to the fallout from the TikTok ban in the US, which was just implemented yesterday. Although ByteDance has divested its Nuverse gaming arm in the past, that apparently wasn’t enough to avoid this fate.

It’s beyond belief that an entire game would be taken offline without it any message to his entire development team, who in turn was unable to alert his fanbase that this was happening. This obviously affects everyone who works at Second Dinner, a group of creators who essentially play the game for a living for their audience, and then all of the game’s players who have spent a lot of money on variant cards for a collection they no longer can access.

The running theory is that this will all just end up being a stunt and that when Donald Trump takes office tomorrow, he will delay this ban or not enforce it or something like that to keep TikTok online. The irony of this is that years ago Trump was at the forefront of trying to get TikTok banned, but he changed his mind at some point during the next election when it appeared that TikTok was starting to benefit his campaign. Now he is quoted in their offline message saying that ByteDance will work directly with Trump to fix this. The CEO was invited to his inauguration.

So it might not last that long. Second Dinner’s social media manager already says the team is working on it: “Don’t worry, we’re working on a fix to get everything back asap. You don’t have to be off for long bro.” I’m not entirely sure how it works with ByteDance apparently doing this unilaterally, but hopefully players will have some updates soon.

follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Blue sky and Instagram.

Get my sci-fi novels Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.