Marvel Snap creator Ben Brode on game’s future after its surprise blackout

Marvel Snap is back.

An unexpected casualty of the TikTok ban, the popular digital card game went dark Saturday night, as I discovered when attempting to sign on while brushing my teeth. I tapped the app, as I do every day, only to find the launch screen emblazoned with these words:

“A law banning ‘Marvel Snap’ has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use Marvel Snap for now.“

TikTok owner ByteDance — which publishes Marvel Snap through subsidiary Nuverse — didn’t inform the game’s developer of the move. By Sunday morning, the error message had changed to say “Marvel Snap” was “temporarily unavailable.” The game was finally restored late Monday.

Marvel Snap creator Ben Brode discussed the bewildering outage in an emailed response through a public relations representative. “We immediately went all hands on deck,” he said. “Together with Nuverse, we worked to identify what was happening and come up with plans to reverse the outage and make sure it wouldn’t happen again going forward.”

Brode also explained that Marvel Snap would change its publishing arrangement. “We’ve reached an agreement with Nuverse to bring many publishing responsibilities in-house and to transfer publishing rights to a new publisher to ensure that Marvel Snap remains accessible for everyone, forever.”

Brode ended on a characteristically enthusiastic note: “We’re excited to share more with our community, and can’t wait until we can reveal more information about what’s next,” he said. “In the meantime, we’re opening a ton of new job openings to supercharge our self-publishing capabilities.”

Days before the surprise ban, I interviewed Brode about the future of Marvel Snap and how he hopes to court users that may have cooled on the game since its acclaimed 2022 debut. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation:

As somebody who kind of saw this baby through to term and then was watching it grow up, what do you think? What’s the next phase going to look like?

“We have a lot of experience with live service game development. It's like the fun part, right? You don't know what's going to happen when you launch and then you get out there and you finally get feedback and you finally get to hear what people think. It starts becoming a collaboration with the community because now we can get a lot of input about what players want.

“We're a couple of years old now, and we're going to do a bunch of card acquisition stuff. We're doubling down on new game modes. It's like one of the most fun ways to re-interpret all the cards you already have because now they could be used in really different and unique ways because the game is fundamentally changed.”

A lot of people have been asking for a “draft mode” – is that in the works?

“That has been in the works for many years, probably at this point. We all come from a long history of card games and there's a lot of fun versions of draft. I would love to see some kind of draft for Marvel Snap. But you know, we've tried a lot of things and we don't have the ultimate fantasy that we think is the best version.

“I think in some ways, the game also can be more set up to be successful. The longer the game is running, the more cards are released too. But, you know, we'll see. I'm not going to promise draft, but I promise that we will continue experimenting with draft until maybe we someday do it.”

How do you onboard people as this experience gets deeper and deeper and deeper? I mean, people can be trapped slowly getting ‘series three’ cards forever. 

“The way that ‘series’ work, where you're brand new to the game, you're getting cards that are a little bit simpler, a little bit easier to kind of figure out. And then you slowly make your way into ‘series two’ and then ‘series three’ when things kind of open up pretty largely, we can add like some of the craziest cards that we've ever made. One of the risks of card games in general is as you add complexity you’re also raising the complexity for brand-new players. That’s not true for Marvel Snap because brand new players come in and get only a taste of ‘series one,’ we can delay that complexity and it's just pretty unique in the card game space.

“It has the downside of making the path to building a competitive deck take longer, right? So we've, in the past, added some new ways to get cards quicker at a target card. This was a huge problem we faced early on was that players who really wanted a specific card just had no outlet, they just kind of had to roll the dice and it was the only thing they could do. We had collector tokens to try and give people more options to get the cards they wanted. This is a big focus for us – how do we continue to make this better and get players revamped card acquisition in a way that players will love. So this is a focus for 2025, for sure.”

You were behind one of the biggest esports ever. What are your ambitions to make Snap more of a spectator sport, or is that not as much of a focus?

“First of all, thank you for I think correctly identifying ‘Hearthstone’ was one of the biggest things for a lot of people. It was like number two behind ‘League of Legends’ for a really long time. But yeah, I think card games are really fun to compete in and I don't know that we've seen the end of high-level competitive play for Marvel Snap. The fact that there's so much bluffing in the game makes that moment where you can see the person just bald-faced lied to their opponent. You know, will the opponent bite it or not. It's very fun. So I don't think we've seen the end of this.”

We’ve discussed onboarding. But then there's also all these bundles that you can spend anywhere from $3 to $100 on. A lot of people look at that and they're uncomfortable with seeing that amount of money on display. How do you respond?

“I mean, look, you could play Marvel Snap for free. It's totally reasonable. You can earn a lot of the cards, and it takes a long time to get there. But it's totally feasible. And then if you would rather spend your money than your time that's an option for you. If you'd rather bling out and show some of the coolest periods of the game, you could spend money on it if you want, but you don't have to do that. It's like an optional thing. And it turns out, when we make awesome stuff, players want to buy it, right? Tons and tons of players play Marvel Snap and never give us a dollar. And I'm like, ‘that's great.’ I think that's like the dream actually is like making a game that's actually feasibly free to play and is super fun for you to play.”

Big picture question: let’s say five years from now, Marvel Snap is still at the top of the Apple Arcade charts. What do you think will make it a sustainable game going forward? How do you retain everyone that's fallen in love with it and get back to people who have fallen out of love with it?

“I mean, at the end of the day, if a game is new and fresh and exciting, I think that's what it boils down to, right? I think about other card games and the ways in which those card games have evolved over years is really surprising. Players and developers come up with new ways to play the game, and sometimes those ways take over. And I'm excited for the future of Marvel Snap.

“I think we could easily see a new game mode that's so fun, maybe it's like the new way that people play Marvel Snap, right? And that's part of the fantasy of us experimenting with all these new game modes. It’s like, ‘What if we discover the best version of Marvel Snap somehow’ in these kinds of ways and a lot of these new game modes and new cards feel like exactly that.”