If you've been playing Marvel Snap within the last few days, you've heard about or were unfortunate enough to experience one of the biggest political dilemmas surrounding the game. On January 18, 2025, following the United States ban on TikTok, Second Dinner made an announcement on X saying that Marvel Snap had been made unavailable to play or download on all platforms in the U.S.
Of course, this came as a complete surprise without any prior communication to both the dev team and the community, and, as a result, it shocked a lot of NA players who woke up one day and received a peculiar notification when they logged into their Snap account.
As of writing this article, the game is officially back in the U.S. and currently undergoing procedures to be available again on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Still, judging by how much of the community this affected, it really does beg the question — what and why did this happen?
Why Did The Hammer Come Down?
To understand the situation, we have to take a look at the current tensions between the U.S. and China, specifically the tension surrounding China’s popular social media app, TikTok. The U.S. government feared that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, could be compelled by the Chinese government to provide access to American user data or influence content, posing potential risks to national security.
In April 2024, Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which required ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok by January 19, 2025, or face a nationwide ban. ByteDance challenged the law, but the Supreme Court upheld it, leading to TikTok's temporary shutdown in the U.S. on January 18, 2025.
So, how did this affect Marvel Snap? Well, another subsidiary brand belonging to ByteDance is Nuverse, Second Dinner’s publisher. As a publisher, they control a lot of operations regarding SD’s properties, including their apps’ distribution, funding, advertising, PR, and more. Thus, when ByteDance got the ban, Nuverse, and by extension, Second Dinner, ceased all operations regarding Marvel Snap in the U.S.
Why Weren’t The Players Informed?
The hostility between ByteDance and the U.S. government was evident and public knowledge for quite some time. However, Nuverse was never brought up in the conversation, so the community assumed that Marvel Snap was doing its own thing, alienated from the drama and discord. We didn’t know if Second Dinner was going to be affected by any drastic action, and it was only after the ban that we saw… the developers didn’t know either.
According to Second Dinner’s tweet, the team was both shocked and uninformed about the outage, and Ben Brode doubled down on this narrative on BlueSky. He reiterated that neither Second Dinner nor Nuverse, the publisher, saw this coming, and were actively discussing resolving the issue.
This statement was a divisive one, where one end of the playerbase sympathized with the team catching a blindside, while the other end believed this was some conspiracy — Second Dinner knew about the impending ban but didn’t inform the community as a way to goad players into buying the Season Pass.
If you ask me, it seems highly unlikely that the developers or publishers would go this far and risk tarnishing their reputation out of pure greed. After all, if it uncovered that Second Dinner, in fact, knew about the ban and intentionally kept it hidden from the audience, they would see an uproar unlike any other.
Alongside that, you only need to consider the inherit costs of such a stunt — shutting down the application and later reinstating it definitely cost a significant amount of money, and no short-term or long-term benefit can justify that.
Chugging Through Dark Times
With the ban in place, U.S. players could neither download the game nor get past the annoying notification when they booted up Marvel Snap. You had major influencers on YouTube and Twitch voicing their concerns about the fact they couldn’t record and upload any in-game footage — their literal livelihood in most cases.
The game’s official discord server was up in flames, and even our Snap.Fan server wasn’t free from the community-wide frustration. Players lost the opportunity to gather Alliance Points, Collection Level, wins for missions, and even the free credits from the shop (no matter how measly they are). Thankfully, Second Dinner acknowledged this fact and guaranteed we would be compensated.
However, there was still a way to bypass the ban: VPN. According to player experience, using any VPN with a region almost anywhere but the U.S. would let you log in and play. Ben Brode pointed this out, too, and even encouraged players to use it if they really wanted to. Of course, there were a few underlying requirements; some players didn’t want to go out of their way and pay for a VPN exclusively for Snap, and the “free” VPNs are always a hit or a dangerous miss.
The Resolution And Aftermath
The ban, although loud, was fortunately short-lived. On January 20, 2025, his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order granting a 75-day reprieve from the ban, allowing TikTok to continue operations while discussions about its future ownership structure took place. TikTok was made online 16 hours after the order passed, and Marvel Snap followed suit almost 30 hours after that.
Snap was back, and Second Dinner made the corresponding announcement on the same day, stating that the game would be back up and running within 24 hours. After that quoted time, the game was indeed up and running, and Second Dinner announced they would partner with a new publisher to ensure this “NEVER happens again.”
It’s still up in the air as to whether ByteDance stopped operations as per U.S. law or by their own volition. There’s been talk about the company doing this as a publicity stunt, showing how easy it was to create unrest if TikTok and other services hosted by them just vanished. Still, these are all allegations, but what actually did happen was Marvel Snap being the most searched card game in the U.S. for a short time, which definitely attracted people who weren’t an established part of the community.
Conclusion
Despite the hassle and backlash, Marvel Snap is on the road to being fully reinstated, as if nothing ever happened. However, something DID happen, and I’m sure everyone wants confirmation that a sudden region lock doesn’t happen, or, at the very least, happens with effective notice beforehand. A sanction is one thing, but being caught off-guard about it due to a lack of communication truly poured fuel over the fire.
Whether you were affected by the ban or not, the event made us realize a concerning reality — we don’t own our games, no matter the investment. There are so many players in the U.S. who likely spent north of a hundred or even a thousand dollars on Marvel Snap, and to see that investment snuffed from third parties who barely care about the game is simply gutting. And, if it happened to one citizen, it could potentially happen to anyone outside the country, too.
We plan on covering this story further and more extensively in the upcoming Burning Questions article later this week. We also reached out to Griffin, Second Dinner’s Community Manager, for comment and further insight. However, while he did decline to share any info that isn't public knowledge already, he confirmed that the team plans to make announcements regarding the issue in future weeks, including this one.
What’s your take on the situation? Were you one of the affected players in this situation, and, if so, how did you cope with it? Share your experience in the comments below so we can take a deeper look at different perspectives.