Back in March, Marvel Snap maker Second Dinner outlined what it was doing to address player frustrations with the hit mobile card game and its roadmap for future content. Just over a month later, some surprise layoffs have raised questions about just how bad things are for the company founded by ex-Blizzard veterans, including former Hearthstone director Ben Brode. He tried to assuage those fears in a late Friday post on the game’s Discord.
“We said goodbye to a few members of our team yesterday, including our awesome community manager,” Brode wrote to fans on May 1. “You know how much he cared about this community and we’re going to miss him. We know many of you will, too. These decisions were painful to make and say nothing about the quality of the people leaving.”
Players first became aware of the cuts when community manager Griffin Bennett, who formerly worked on Destiny 2 and Overwatch, broke the news on X earlier in the week that he’d been laid off. “No hard feelings to my friends and colleagues at SD,” he wrote. “Their future is incredibly bright.”
The Marvel Snap community was not immediately reassured, however. There’s been a sense that the game has been struggling ever since it went independent after getting caught up in the U.S.’s temporary TikTok ban (both apps were at the time owned by ByteDance). The March 2026 roadmap addressed some of the issues of taking over publishing responsibilities for the game and the team spreading itself too thin between too many game modes. There are also more fundamental design concerns around stagnating game mechanics and the balance between earned progression and pay-to-win FOMO.
“For those of you concerned about Snap, we’re still here, still building, still committed to this game and to you,” Brode wrote this week in Discord. “The roadmap we shared in March remains the same. This is us making hard decisions to make sure we can keep going, not a sign that we’re winding down.”
One fan theory is that as the Marvel movie machine ramps back up this year, the costs of licensing the IP for the game may be increasing as well. “I’m not overly worried,” wrote a player on the Marvel Snap subreddit. “The game will need it’s bugs fixed but it also is a lot of fun. I get that things slow down and people need to downsize to fit the needs of the game but that’s just the normal cycle of games.”
Another was not so optimistic. “Snap isn’t done, but this is definitely not a good sign,” they wrote. “Once quality drops, it’s on cruise control until the whales fall off.”
