Marvel Snap, the winner of the 2022 Game Award for Best Mobile Game, was blipped out of existence in the US late Saturday night, sparking confusion and outrage among American card game battlers.
Around the stroke of midnight, players trying to log in to the fast-paced, Marvel Universe-themed game were greeted with this notice and could go no further:
As it turns out, while the hit app may be developed by California-based Second Dinner, it is published by Nuverse, which is owned by ByteDance. If the latter name sounds familiar, that's because ByteDance is the Chinese company behind TikTok, which has targeted with a ban by the US government.
Following a prolonged legal dispute, the US Supreme Court on Friday affirmed a law prohibiting the widely-used video-sharing platform due to national security issues, unless ByteDance transfers ownership to non-Chinese buyers by Sunday.
Being unable to log in to your favorite mobile game and complete daily quests is frustrating enough; but what really irked US social media users was the apparent lack of notice from the game's makers that Snap was among the apps — including editing software CapCut, Lemon8, and Gauth — that would be rendered unusable by the high court's decision.
Second Dinner themselves published a statement on X after midnight on Sunday indicating that they were as surprised as US gamers were.
Some commenters were quick to point out that, though individual users could be excused for not understanding the intricacies of company ownership and not realizing Snap would be affected the ban, publishers Nuverse would have known that their ByteDance connections would come into play once the Supreme Court ruled on the TikTok ban.
In any case, Marvel Snap players in the US are left to rue the lack of notice about the game's outage. They will no doubt be hoping that Second Dinner and Nuverse get their act together and get one of the most popular games on the Apple app store back online soon.
Meanwhile, ByteDance-owned Moonton was also affected by the ban, meaning US-based players of the popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game Mobile Legends: Bang Bang were unable to access the game client on Saturday night/Sunday morning.