I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing Marvel Snap, but I’m considering leaving the game for good

It’s always a rough feeling when you’re enjoying a game a lot, but you know its days are numbered.

Last year, I got into XDefiant and Star Wars: Hunters. XDefiant is no longer playable, while both the Nintendo Switch and mobile versions of Star Wars: Hunters will be shut down on October 1.

While the game still has a decent-sized player base and content lined up for the next several months, I can’t help but feel that Marvel Snap is on the precipice of a similar downfall. I’m seriously considering quitting Marvel Snap before it reaches that point.

Marvel Snap is a collectible card game based on the popular comic book universe for PC and mobile.

I’ve played the game almost every day since it entered beta in 2022, investing hundreds of hours in it over the past three years. However, several changes to the course of 2025, in particular, have left me on the verge of wanting to quit the game more than ever before.

I’m not sure if there’s a straightforward way for Second Dinner to win me back either, which is not a good sign for Marvel Snap’s future.

Marvel Snap has had a tumultuous 2025

From being shut down to overpriced cards

2025 started off rough for Marvel Snap when the TikTok ban happened in January. At the time, Marvel Snap’s publisher was Nuverse, a company owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance.

When TikTok’s servers were shut off in the United States, so did Marvel Snap’s. This brought a lot of attention to the game, and Second Dinner gave a hefty amount of free rewards to players to make up for the time lost during its temporary ban.

Fans like me felt optimistic when Second Dinner announced plans to self-publish Marvel Snap in the future, following this debacle, but it was an early sign that this would be a tumultuous year for the game.

The first few months of the year went pretty well for the game, but it became clear that the Spotlight Key system Marvel Snap used for card acquisition wasn’t working.

In April, Second Dinner introduced a new “Snap Packs” system, which gave players more control over the cards they could obtain.

Unfortunately, the reframing of card acquisition in this way made the value of individual cards more expensive, which had some drastic negative impacts on Marvel Snap.

If you wanted a specific card the week of release, it now costs 6,000 Collector’s Tokens, which is more than can easily be earned in a week. That didn’t feel great, but these negative feelings came to a head in the worst way possible in June.

Second Dinner flooded the season with more cards than usual, clogging up Snap Packs.

Then, when it released a limited-time game mode called High Voltage Overdrive, players discovered that it was almost impossible to earn Kid Omega, a card temporarily exclusive to the event, just through play.

Although acquiring new cards has always felt pretty expensive, this is the first time Marvel Snap felt truly pay-to-win to me.

Even worse, Second Dinner’s response to the debacle was poor, and players received no compensation as an apology, like they did with the January server shutdown.

Then, this month, an additional card was locked behind the $20 Super Premium Season Pass.

These mistakes, and many other smaller tweaks that reduced the amount or kinds of currency that players can obtain, have made Marvel Snap feel more like a pay-to-win game than ever before.

Marvel Snap is leaning into the worst tendencies of mobile gaming

And its player base is starting to take notice

While this recent aggressive monetization of Marvel Snap is disappointing, it isn’t exactly unexpected.

Such pricey microtransactions aren’t uncommon in the realm of free-to-play mobile games, which is why mobile games tend to have a bad reputation among PC and console gamers.

For a while, though, Marvel Snap was able to skirt those concerns. New cards were steadily added every week, but could never easily be purchased with real money. Microtransactions were restricted to cosmetic bundles.

Over the past six months or so, Marvel Snap’s catalog of cards has become large enough and aggressively monetized enough that it’s no longer cheap or fun to stay near-collection complete.

Nowadays, it feels less monetized like a card game, such as Hearthstone, and more like a gacha game, where spending money is used to “pull” different characters, similar to Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle.

The player base and creators are getting fed up with this, with recent Steam reviews being overwhelmingly negative.

Even popular influencers in the Marvel Snap space, such as Regis Killbin, Alexander Coccia, and Cozy Snap, have created videos critiquing Second Dinner, their monetization practices, and how they interact with creators.

When a community starts turning against a game they love, that’s never a good sign.

For a long time, many people saw Marvel Snap as one of the most approachable and entertaining free-to-play mobile games. It no longer has that goodwill.

I’m getting ready to stop playing Marvel Snap

Second Dinner needs to make things better, and do so soon

Ultimately, I’m afraid that Marvel Snap is caught in a catch-22 situation that ends in nothing but misery (which also happens to be the name of a Marvel character in the game).

Second Dinner is monetizing its player base more aggressively, leading to increased player attrition. However, since players are leaving, they’ll need to continue monetizing Marvel Snap more harshly to keep profits up.

It’s a negative spiral that many mobile games fall into before they shut down or become nearly unplayable for newcomers, and Marvel Snap is right in the thick of it.

As a veteran player who has stuck with Marvel Snap for a long time, I feel tired. It’s starting to feel like a non-stop grind that has more in common with money-hungry gacha games than the quick, fun, and approachable card game that it was at its genesis.

I’m sticking around through this Fantastic Four: First Steps season, but I’m currently planning to play much less of the game afterward.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, which leaves me worried about Marvel Snap’s future. I don’t want Marvel Snap to end up in the wasteland of shuttered free-to-play mobile games.