Collateral damage in the TikTok clusterfuck has been hit mobile deckbuilder, Marvel Snap. Still going strong since it was all we could think about at the end of 2022, the Marvel-licensed game created by Ben “Hearthstone” Brode and his team at Second Dinner has been offline in the United States since TikTok went down Saturday night.
This situation has likely come about because Marvel Snap is ultimately owned by the same Chinese company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, who are the target of the bungled ban by the outgoing Democrats, in their self-destructive desperation to hand Trump a day-one win for his second go at playing a president on TV. However, developer Second Dinner has let it be known that it is doing all it can to get Marvel Snap back online, and they’re hoping that’s at some point this Martin Luther King Day.
Late Sunday night, the company put out a statement on X acknowledging the situation, and the intention to “have it back online within 24 hours.”
Exactly why Marvel Snap got taken down at the same time as the TikTok ban came into force is unclear, and it certainly wasn’t expected by Second Dinner. On January 19, when the game suddenly went dark in the U.S., the developer posted, “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.”
At the same time, Second Dinner let affected players know it is aware that the downtime screws with a bunch of “time-based content, rewards, and missions,” but promised to all would be “compensated for their lost time.”
However, despite TikTok already being back online, Marvel Snap is still down Monday morning. Trump immediately declared his plan to intervene as soon as the ban was enacted (a ban which, of course, he himself announced in 2020), which gave TikTok the confidence to come back online. However, it seems ByteDance’s Marvel Snap has gotten caught in the crossfire. TikTok boss Shou Zi Chew is attending Trumps inauguration, so perhaps someone could ask him to flick the switch back on for Snap while they’re there?
Marvel Snap isn’t alone in being caught in all this. Other ByteDance apps like CapCut and Lark are also down, as the Chinese company presumably just yoinked everything at once to be safe from violating the ban. However, Snap is still available and working as normal in the rest of the world.
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