Marvel Snap went dark in the United States on Saturday evening local time, with a pop-up message informing players it was down in the entire country, as a result of a new US law. As of writing, it remains offline – and that’s despite fellow downed app TikTok having service restored within 24 hours of its removal.
Both apps are products of Chinese company ByteDance (Marvel Snap publisher Nuverse is a subsidiary of the company), which announced a removal of its services in the United States after the country attempted to force it to divest TikTok, over concerns it was gathering user data via the app. For several years now, the United States has been attempting to ban TikTok as a means to uphold “national security” and has attempted to force ByteDance to sell to the US, to allay fears.
Just hours ahead of this ban passing, ByteDance chose to remove its services from the US, leading to TikTok, CapCut, Marvel Snap, and an array of other products being removed from app stores in the country. In its user alert, ByteDance outlined the reasons for the ban, but promised it was “working to restore [its] service in the US,” with more news on the way.
Weirdly enough, TikTok has now been made available once more, with a message thanking incoming president Donald Trump for his “efforts” to restore the app. (It’s worth noting Trump was the initiator of the ban in the first place.)
Read: Marvel Snap designer Kent-Erik Hagman talks smart card game design
Despite not being the target of the newly-implemented US law, Marvel Snap currently remains offline in the US, alongside apps like CapCut, Lemon8, and more. What’s more – it appears the sudden offlining of the game came as a significant surprise for its development team, which are no doubt currently looking for answers.
“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,” Second Dinner tweeted in the minutes following the shut down. “We’re actively working on getting the game up as soon as possible and will update you once we have more to share.”
The irony here is that Second Dinner is a California-based company, which created a game using Disney-owned characters, who are as American as they come. It’s just that Marvel Snap is published by Nuverse – and therefore it has ties to ByteDance.
At this stage, it appears unlikely that Marvel Snap itself would have been offlined by the incoming US law banning TikTok. What’s more likely is ByteDance pulling its apps to show the potential impact its absence would have, as a means to create more pressure for the US government to change its stance on allowing apps like TikTok to operate.
We do expect Marvel Snap to reappear in the US imminently, but at this stage, it’s unclear why it remains offline when ByteDance’s biggest app has now returned to service as normal. Stay tuned for an update from Second Dinner and Nuverse.
