When TikTok disappeared over the weekend nobody was surprised. Its U.S. ban had been bouncing around Congress and the courts for over a year. But when Marvel Snap disappeared too fans and the devs alike were shocked. The hit 2022 mobile game is now back online and playable, and the studio behind it says it’s now working to make sure a surprise outage never happens again.
“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,” developer Second Dinner wrote on X on January 20, the day after the ban—part of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA)—went into effect. “This is the start of a new era for Marvel Snap.” The team went on to say that while this probably leaves fans with “more questions than answers,” it’ll have more information to share in the future about the state of the game and its relationship to TikTok owner ByteDance.
The 2023 top-grossing digital card game went dark right at the same time TikTok came offline, despite not being mentioned in the legislation passed by Congress last year, which sought to ban the social media app unless its Chinese owners divested from it. Its surprise disappearance appears to have been reversed following President Trump’s promise to intervene to delay TikTok’s ban on ByteDance’s behalf, until a new arrangement can be found. However, the app is still missing from app stores as tech companies navigate a minefield of potential legal liabilities under the current law.
While not owned outright by ByteDance, Marvel Snap is published by Nuverse, one of its subsidiaries. And unlike TikTok, which is free to use, the game’s disappearance left millions of players who had poured hundreds into its collectible card game universe with no way to access their accounts. “This outage is a surprise to us and wasn’t planned,” the developers confessed over the weekend. They also promised that players would be “compensated” for all missed “time-based content, rewards, and missions” amid the outage.
While Marvel Snap is back up and running and accessible on PC, the app version is still unavailable on Apple’s and Google’s mobile storefronts. “We’re working on restoring App Store availability,” Second Dinner confirmed overnight. “It may take some time. We’ll keep you updated.” In the meantime, turn-based RPG Marvel Strike Force is now the first result anytime someone searches for Marvel Snap in the App and Google Play stores.
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