Marvel Snap’s Microtransactions Are All Over The Place

Marvel Snap was one of our favorite games of last year, in part because of its deep easy-to-play, hard-to-master battle mechanics. But it was also a breath of fresh air as a free-to-play game that found an entirely new way to capitalize on its card-collecting backbone, with a unique upgrade path that relied on what you already wanted to do: Collect cool cards and make them look even cooler.

Snap has exploded in popularity since launch, and we’ve seen the arrival of many more ways in which we can give developer Second Dinner our money in exchange for cards and credits. And while the game is still in large part unusually fair for a free-to-play mobile game, the sheer variety of in-app purchases means that some of its offerings are great values, and others are simply awful. As a result, it’s hard to pinpoint any central philosophy behind the game and its monetization strategy in its current state.

To understand how the game’s monetization works, you first need to understand its core progression. Marvel Snap eschews the traditional randomized card packs of most CCGs, and instead grants you new cards as part of your Collection Level (CL). That level is raised by visually upgrading the cards you already have, with a variety of flourishes like a 3D effect or animated elements. You play to collect boosters for your favorite cards, then upgrade them to look better, which gets you more cards, and the cycle repeats.

Second Dinner did experiment with something resembling a more traditional randomized element before launch, when it was in a beta period. Nexus Events let you exchange the premium currency, gold, for randomized loot boxes that could hold exclusive cards, variants, and avatars. But Nexus Events were notoriously unpopular with players, creating a potentially endless treadmill to earn a particular card. The backlash was fierce, so Second Dinner quickly scuttled the scheme, issued refunds, and gave everyone a copy of the sought-after card, Jane Foster. Chief development officer Ben Brode promised that future monetization features will better keep in mind that “we need to be providing value and creating a player-friendly experience.”

Currently, the centerpiece of Snap’s monetization is the battle pass, which is renewed every 4-5 weeks and costs $10, or $15 for the pass with level skips. That’s the yardstick by which we measure any other offering, and it’s developed a reputation as a good value for Snap fans. Provided you play enough to advance through its levels, the latest season pass gives you a new card immediately without needing to earn it through other means, along with four random variants for cards you already have, two special variants that fit the seasonal theme, one variant for your new card, a card back, avatar images, titles, and lots of gold and credits. Quantifying the exact rewards is difficult since you can continue to earn randomized extra rewards like credits and tokens once you exceed level 50, but it serves as a helpful baseline.

Alongside the season pass, though, you can purchase several bundles–many of which occupy the store simultaneously–and their prices vary wildly. As of the time of writing, for example, you can get a Welcome Bundle, a Pro Bundle, or a Festival Fireworks Bundle with prices marked in dollars, making for easy comparisons. The Welcome Bundle is the typically generous bundle often served to newcomers as a one-time offer in free-to-play mobile games, granting you a Captain America variant and avatar along with a very generous amount of the game’s premium currency, gold, for roughly $3. A current Festival Fireworks bundle to mark the Lunar New Year is similarly well-priced, with a special Jubilee variant and avatar, boosters, and 500 credits and 500 gold, for $5.

But those bundles also serve to accentuate the strange disparity in pricing for the much higher-priced Pro Bundle. This one is a whopping $100, and for that price you get 12,500 credits and 1,240 boosters. The boosters are split among eight characters at 155 boosters each, which gives you enough to level each of them to Infinite. The shop boasts that this is enough to immediately raise you roughly 250 collection levels, but experienced Snap players know that 250 CL isn’t actually all that much. You’re likely to rise that much within a season or two with the season pass, which would only cost $20-30 total at most. For a new player, immediately going to CL 250 would only get you partway into the second tier of cards. It’s hard to imagine paying 10 months’ worth of season passes for this privilege.

These comparisons get messier when they’re obscured by gold, a premium currency that you can purchase in bundles ranging from $5 to $100. You also earn gold regularly through play, and some transactions are only available in gold, rather than real money. Most of the time you can spend gold on variants or to refresh your quests faster, but occasional gold-only bundles will appear. A Primal Masterpiece bundle themed to the Savage Land season, for example, offered three exclusive variants and avatars, plus boosters, for 3,000 gold–a reasonable value considering variants often cost 700-1200 gold a la carte.

But these bundles can also be contentious. The Starlit Connection bundle, for example, offered just two exclusive anime-styled variants and avatars of Sera and Angela, plus 4,000 credits, for the rough equivalent of $50. It was a high-priced bundle, complicated by the fact that Sera in particular is a very competitive card used in several high-level decks. (Angela, by comparison, is available in the very first card pool, so the value of the Bundle is almost entirely Sera.) Though the bundle ostensibly only offers a variant of Sera, purchasing it before you’ve obtained the standard Sera will still allow you to use the card. In this way, Marvel Snap opened itself to criticism that it was allowing players to pay for a competitive advantage.

Accusations of pay-to-win is a serious charge against any F2P mobile game, and to be clear, that isn’t the case here. Paying for a particular single card is a shortcut to a card that may have simply not appeared for you yet. But it’s also true that offering high-priced bundles for competitive card variants complicates the situation more than simply offering variants of lower-tier cards that most regular players would already have or be able to easily obtain.

The much more serious problem may simply be that the sheer number and frequency of new bundles is starting to get overwhelming. Even as a dedicated Marvel Snap player, I find myself having trouble keeping track of all the offerings. What’s worse, I’m often hesitant to jump on a new bundle–even one I might like–because I expect another to follow so closely on its heels.

Marvel Snap is still unusually fair for a mobile game, and Second Dinner deserves credit for coming up with an innovative way to reward progression with a digital-first solution instead of merely borrowing the old mechanic of randomized packs. But the irregular, too-frequent, and all-over-the-map bundling strategy seems aimed at tempting whales–the rare minority of players willing to spend $50 for two variant cards or $100 for a big bundle of randomized boosters at a regular pace. It’s not an uncommon tactic, but it is one that can lend itself to player confusion and concerns regarding fairness, and makes visiting the shop less exciting and more unpleasant.