The message

Marvel Snap

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

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

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

“Unfortunately, MARVEL SNAP is temporarily unavailable in U.S. app stores and is unavailable to play in the U.S.

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

We’re actively working on getting the game up as soon as possible and will update you once we have more to share.”

Ben Brode, Marvel Snaps’ Chief Development Officer, is actually recommending that players use a VPN, which can make it seem like you’re playing from Canada, to get around the ban temporarily.

All of this is happening because all ByteDance apps are going offline thanks to the fallout from the TikTok ban in the US which was just implemented yesterday. Even though previously ByteDance divested itself from its Nuverse gaming arm, that was apparently not enough to avoid this fate.

Marvel Snap

Second Dinner

It is beyond unbelievable that an entire game would be taken offline without any notice to its entire development team, who in turn were not be able to make its fanbase aware this was happening. This obviously impacts everyone who works at Second Dinner, a group of creators that plays the game essentially for a living for their audiences, and then all the game’s players who have shelled out a lot of cash for variant cards for a collection they can no longer access.

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

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

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