“Marvel Snap” is now banned in the US, a strange connection to the closure of TikTok

While the shutdown of one of the most widely used social media apps in the United States, TikTok, is all anyone can talk about right now, an underreported aspect of the story is that it applies to all applications from its parent company, ByteDance. That includes things like video editing app CapCut, but as players learned Sunday night, it also includes…Marvel Snap?

Marvel Snap is a digital card game developed by Second Dinner, so how did he catch a stray animal here? Well, ByteDance was the publisher of Marvel Snap. There was a somewhat ugly situation in 2023 when ByteDance divested from 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 appears they are still technically the publisher to make this happen.

But whatever is going on here, they took Snap offline before the company was banned along with these other apps, although they are supposed to get out of the gaming business. When players attempt to log in, they are greeted with an almost identical message that TikTokers are showing up that reads:

“Sorry, MARVEL SNAP is not available at the moment.

A law banning MARVEL SNAP has been enacted in the United States. Unfortunately, this means you cannot use MARVEL SNAP at this time. Rest assured, we are working to restore our service in the United States.

Unlike a variation of the TikTok post, there is no mention of new President Donald Trump, who ByteDance says will make a deal with them to bring TikTok back online in the United States. And if that happens, then all these other apps would repopulate, probably including Marvel Snap.

This is a deeply strange situation, as most gamers probably didn’t know that ByteDance had anything to do with Marvel Snap, as the face of the game is California studio Second Dinner. Again, ByteDance reportedly divested itself of Nuverse and Snap, but it’s still mixed up in the web.

I am currently investigating other games that could be affected by this ban, based on Nuverse or other ByteDance subsidiary projects. Some of these games like Warhammer 40,000: Lost Crusade have already been shut down, and Marvel Snap seems to be the most hyped game so far to move away from this whole situation.

Essentially, 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 bigger story here, it’s 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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