The developer of Marvel Snap has confirmed it has landed a new publishing partner in the wake of this month’s outage that saw the game suddenly become unplayable in the US.
In a statement, Second Dinner said it had “already signed agreements and started the work to bring almost all operational and publish ing responsibilities in-house”, with support from Skystone Games, a US-based indie games publisher.
Second Dinner had previously pledged to ditch its current publisher, Nuverse, in order to avoid any further disruption.
Marvel Snap went offline in the US for over 24 hours and was pulled from app stores in the country as a result of Nuverse’s parent company being ByteDance – the Chinese owner of social meda app TikTok.
TikTok has officially been banned in the US due to security concerns around how it handles user data, and similarly went offline for a brief period. For now, the ban has been paused while negotiations continue over an expected sale – with Microsoft reportedly one of the interested parties.
At the time of Marvel Snap’s sudden outage, US users were greeted with a message apologising that the game “isn’t available right now” as “a law banning Marvel Snap has been enacted in the US”.
As players reacted in shock, the game’s developers issued a statement which suggested they had been given no warning the downtime was set to occur.
“This outage is a surprise to us and wasn’t planned. Marvel Snap isn’t going anywhere,” Second Dinner said in a defiant statement. “We’re actively working on getting the game up as soon as possible.”
After the game returned, Second Dinner announced an enormous package of in-game rewards as an apology to players, and pledged to find a new publisher “to make sure this never happens again”.