With the introduction of the cosmetics shop, purchasable borders, and tests of the new League feature in select regions, the larger Snap community has remained constantly abuzz about its favorite topic, Second Dinner’s monetization. In this article, we're going to reassess the current state of the Snap economy and explore the points of view expressed by some of Snap's best content creators. Still, we're also going to try to answer the question that is the title of this article: Why is Marvel Snap so expensive?
After the last patch, which included the addition of the cosmetics shop and emotes available for gold, Drewberry released a video detailing some of the issues he currently has with the game.
His basic thesis is that because so much of the development team's time and energy is going towards monetization targeted at high-spender ‘whales’ in the form of cosmetics and bundles, the rest of the game feels more stale for him.
After collectible borders came to the game, Bradcifer bluntly put his issues with the new cosmetic into words.
Pinpointing the frustration many players have with Second Dinner continuing to price cosmetics aggressively while not then making the actual game pieces more affordable, Bradcifer said this:
“You're already charging people if they want to try to get more cards, that are all series 5, and then you're also saying ‘oh you want things to look pretty?’ You have to spend even more to do that. You have to pick a lane!”
KMBest said this on Episode 71 of the Snapshot podcast after the release of collectible borders:
“Why are they doing all this to the cosmetic side and not making things cheaper? I've got a horrifying suggestion for you. What if the ‘making things cheaper’ already happened and they're just clawing it back.”
It was an off-the-cuff remark, but there is an abundance of evidence for this. If you recall, way back on February 21st, Stephen Jarrett, head of product at Second Dinner, said this about the Spotlight Cache system:
“Spotlight Caches are substantially more generous than the token shop but have largely been met with negativity since its release. Spotlight Caches hit a rough spot where they are more generous, harder for us to create enough content to sustain (Spotlight variants), and see more negatively. It is challenging to make big changes to the system or give out more free rewards because of the generosity of spotlight caches. Our economic design space is somewhat limited by then. Our hope is to try to iron out the edges that feel bad and consider options to make it easier for us to create enough content to sustain it while finding other ways to open economic design space.”
It is now clear that the “other ways to open economic design space” have been found in the cosmetics shop, collectible borders, and the new Leagues currently being tested. You can't accuse Second Dinner of not being innovative.
I've seen a lot of complaints that the new Leagues are a pay-to-win Money grab. While it is true that the Leagues are pay-to-win events, many critics are missing the point by not realizing that Second Dinner needs to derive some revenue from them. That would qualify if they drove massive additional engagement or brought new or returning players to the game. However, Leagues aren't designed to achieve that — they are designed as an additional revenue source. If they don't earn additional revenue, the developer would have no reason to devote personnel to their design or create them in the first place. While it's unrealistic to expect Leagues to be free, I think a hard limit on how much gold can be spent on event perks would help make them less divisive.
The best recent breakdown of the cost of playing Marvel Snap is Jeff Hoogland’s Economy Math video. He organizes the game into even 13-week periods to analyze the numbers of cards and caches different spenders can expect on average.
https://www.youtube.com/live/YvjC9WgKpBw?si=8mZAIzy3D18T-fRm
Hoogland arrives at the following averages: A totally free-to-play account can expect to get 7-8 cards out of the 16 new releases in a 13-week period. If you buy the season pass and the gold pass ($15/mo), you can immediately get approximately 11-12 new releases out of 16. This doesn't mean you'll never get those remaining 4 to 5 cards (about one or two per season), but rather, you won't be able to get them on release day. According to the video, to make it likely that you'll get all of the cards immediately on release, you will need to pay about $80 per month ($15 for the SP and Gold pass, plus enough to make up the remaining resources to get that last card). It should be said that these calculations are based on fully min/maxing your resources by converting gold into tokens whenever possible. The token amounts used in the video are based on the Token Tuesday rate of 1500 gold for 1200 tokens. For several months now, the rates have been closer to 1400 for 1000 gold, but the newest one is back to 1500/1200. This gap can also be made up if future bundles are similar in value to the recent Jane Foster bundle 2400 gold for 2000 tokens) and the upcoming Jessica Jones bundle (3500 gold for 3000 tokens). Bundles with mixed currencies, like the previous 5000 gold Captain Marvel bundle (3000 tokens + 3000 credits), are expressly designed to obfuscate value and make maximizing your resources more difficult.
Still, the highest value gold bundles remain the best use of your resources, not token Tuesdays, unless the rates change permanently. This also means min/maxing requires dodging the various gold sinks in the game, more and more of which are being added to intentionally disincentivize players from fully optimizing towards game pieces alone. A little gold here (Leagues) or a lot of gold there (emotes), and you fall further from these targets, necessitating a cash bundle purchase to make up for it. Furthermore, many players, myself included, have interacted successfully with the new system by entering with a stockpile of resources from the system change-over. Are we in for another economic shock as a wave of players’ stockpiles hit zero? For players with a large enough buffer (or medium to big spenders), credits become a more important resource to focus on than tokens. Dropping to zero or starting out without this stockpile makes it difficult to follow the necessary optimization advice of only opening when you have at least four caches. New or lapsed players might want to skip several weeks immediately before opening caches and getting back on track, which doesn't sound fun. Or, as Second Dinner hopes, you can buy a large cash bundle.
We arrived at different numbers than Hoogland shows for the gold pass and how best to spend gold (he worked through these numbers on a live stream, which you can view for yourself here if you want the full nitty-gritty; as Hoogland notes, mobile in-game economies are intentionally difficult to calculate). The numbers above and what affects them are useful, but the most interesting part of the video was the discussion of the changes caused by adding an additional card to the first week of each season.
“We went from 13 cards being released over a 13-week period … up to 16 cards being released, an additional one per season,” explains Hoogland.
“The reason for this increase, I think, is assuredly related to the numbers that I broke down here today being accurate.” He further explains how 13 cards per 13-week cycle was near a breakpoint. “Specifically, I highlighted the fact that season pass/gold pass players get approximately 12 cards per 13-week season.” In other words, most players would be able to get every card immediately as it came out for just $15 or so per month.
“I think it's apparent from Second Dinner’s response to this happening that that is not something that they view as economically sustainable for Marvel Snap as a product.”
Second Dinner very likely added the additional card per month in direct response to this breakpoint. Rather than making changes elsewhere, they elected to add more cards per month, which is certainly preferable to the alternative of reducing rewards or increasing costs elsewhere. Second Dinner clearly wants a system where season pass buyers go without at least one new card per month. Most seasoned card gamers like to have a complete collection. In Snap, that last hurdle from most to all is high.
Everything Second Dinner has done since the implementation of Spotlight Caches strongly implies that they were caught off guard by the generosity of the Spotlight Cache system and have been “clawing it back” ever since. Initially, weekend missions included far more tokens for those who purchased a new card each week. The initial offering of 1000 tokens for Silk dwarfs the 200 we've gotten for all of the recent cards. Including one or two series 4 cards also made the system far cheaper than now, as all recent releases have been series 5. Collectible borders, 2200 gold emotes, and the League events seem like the new “economic design space” Jarrett referred to back in February. Token Tuesdays coming in at lower rates also has an impact. The revamp of the bonus booster system is an example of a new economic design. It cleverly gets players to log in more, hoard credits less, and spend more money in the long run. It's one of their most clever changes and a rare win-win for their bottom line and the players.
Ultimately, we don't know how much Second Dinner’s operating costs are. However, it is abundantly clear that they deem the current Spotlight Cache system insufficient for their bottom line as the system was initially organized. From the piecemeal changes they've made, we can infer they have felt a squeeze since the introduction of Spotlight Caches. We know that they treat their employees better than average, provide generous holidays, and can attract top talent from other companies like Glenn Jones (formerly at Wizards of the Coast) and Griffin Bennett (formerly at Bungie). They also commission professional, working artists rather than just contracting with a single graphics studio. None of that is cheap. Additionally, players from other types of games tend to overestimate the player base that a card game can achieve. To expect anything similar economically to games like Fortnite and Call of Duty is fanciful. It is also pertinent to note the fate of fellow card games, Gwent, Legends of Runeterra, and Artifact. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that those games did not nail monetization. All of them had a combination of problems that Second Dinner is directly attempting to avoid—insufficient revenue from cosmetics, players hoarding or being flush with too many resources, the smaller potential player base of a card game instead of other types of games, and player disengagement. The Spotlight Cache system has achieved its goal of more cards for more players, yet it seems unpopular with both players and the company. That's a difficult intersection for a game to find itself at. While Snap remains cheaper than many monetized mobile games, legacy online CCGs, and paper TCGs, it is cold comfort to players expecting a robust free-to-play experience.
My primary problem with the system is the potential for extremely low rolls. For example, out of 16 cards in a 13-week period, a Season Pass + Gold Pass buyer can expect to get approximately 11 of them. Well, of course, not everyone will have the same luck. That is the median expectation for a player fully optimizing for new cards. In the long run, many people will end up pretty close to that average per 13-week cycle, but a nonzero number of people will have wildly good or bad luck with their caches. This variance can be especially damaging at the small sample size of 13 weeks. The 2.5 average number of caches it takes to pull a new card is true, but players aren't going to stick around for a year to regress to the mean. They'll just quit after a cold streak, especially in a system that rewards having a runway of resources built up. Remember, a bell curve is made up of real people, and depending on how many people play Snap, hundreds or thousands of them will need to use far more caches to get new cards than others and will quit because of that experience. Second Dinner should do something to lop off the tail end of the distribution curve in the form of a pity timer or similar protective system.
The Bottom Line
- Second Dinner has absolutely been taking steps to trim at the edges of the Spotlight Cache system
- These steps include reducing weekend mission rewards, introducing expensive cosmetics, and creating new monetization avenues such as Leagues and in-game Vibranium Offers.
- We can infer that since the introduction of the Spotlight Cache system, revenue is short of what Second Dinner expects or requires, though we'll probably never know which
- Second Dinner is monetizing more aggressively than some other card games.
- This more aggressive monetization, by comparison, might be a positive for the game's long-term viability.
- Something must be done to prevent the possibility of extremely bad Spotlight Cache luck.
- Most players must choose at least one card to skip each season.
- The system currently requires players to build up a runway of resources to optimize properly, which can be especially difficult for new or lapsed players.
- Expect more gold and credit sinks in the game, like Spotlight variants or other new purchasables
Knowing that this is the hot-button topic in the Marvel Snap community and given that this is not my first day on the Internet, I assume many of you will want to share your thoughts on Second Dinner’s approach to monetizing Marvel Snap. Do you want to disagree with my perspective or any of the content creators above? Want to speculate wildly about the inner workings of the company? I have some economic rage in need of an outlet, whether you read the whole article or just the title. That's what the comments section is for!