I find no other way to begin this rant other than posting a reminder that just very recently we could purchase a functioning game and enjoy it without random shenanigans blocking our progress. Sure, some games have monthly subscription fees, but that’s commonly accepted. Microtransactions started to gain notoriety in the gaming world with the Horse Armor DLC for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. For a measly $2.50, you could buy a fancy virtual armor for your horse in Oblivion (a single-player experience, mind you, so no show-offs on multiplayer servers!). A little over a decade and a half later, we’re looking at a Darkhawk Bundle in Marvel Snap that costs 10 times more. At what point do microtransactions start to become macrotransactions?
Is Darkhawk Bundle Worth Buying in Marvel Snap?
No, it’s not worth it. Now let’s get back to the rant that you came for here.
The majority of the Marvel Snap community is severely upset over the pricing of the bundle, especially with the “3x value” tag being slapped in the corner. Several major content creators voiced their opinions against this bundle (despite admitting they’ve spent thousands of dollars on the game) with the commenters of those videos supporting the opinions, not to mention Twitter and Reddit exploding in discourse. I apologize, Ben Brode, you are right – it does provide three times the value, but three times zero is still equal to zero from a mathematical standpoint. I personally feel no affinity toward gathering an infinite amount of variants that keep sprouting up from patch to patch. I’ve seen many games drive away their players like this.
Have a glimpse at this Reddit Post where a user found out that you can buy an actual Darkhawk comic for less money than this bundle in-game. The best things about the comic book are that:
- You can read it again and again and again, borrow it, or gift it. It will still be there for you!
- You can resell it sooner or later
- You can, in dire situations, use it to start a campfire…
With the Darkhawk bundle, you can:
- Play a different, cooler-looking version of the Darkhawk card, or gain access to it if you do not have it yet (but still, the collector’s reserve may grant you a default version of Darkhawk later).
- Gain 1000 Credits (that you would otherwise just gain in a few days of doing the daily quests, and you cannot raise your Collection Level sufficiently for it to feel that it’s a significant improvement).
- Gain 310 Boosters (that you would get in 310 turns or 52 games that have full 6 Turns).
- I once again appeal to Second Dinner to remove Boosters and convert our Boosters to Credits, since they are a completely useless mechanic that only serves to increase the grinding fatigue. It’s a big pain for newer players. I am past the 5500 Collection Level and I have more boosters than I can spend.
You can’t sell or trade the variant when you get bored of it (Marvel Snap is a CCG, not a TCG). You can’t even trade or sell your Marvel Snap account as a whole. And inevitably, a live service game like this will cease to exist at some point, so you are basically “renting” stuff. You do not own anything. Are you feeling happy?
Related: A Player Has Somehow Reached The Current Maximum Collection Level in Marvel Snap
For the amount of money that’s asked of you for this cosmetic and an insignificant collection boost, you can buy one or two good Indie games and extract hours of fun from them.
Let’s talk about the price again. Why does it need to be that high? Would Second Dinner rather sell it once for $30 or 10 times for $5? Are they experimenting to see how far they can push their macrotransaction prices?
There was once a bundle a couple of months ago that the community wholeheartedly believes was placed as a joke to see how many they would sell because the price for what you get was just inexcusable and laughably bad. Not to mention that Second Dinner persists with questionable decisions, such as; the in-game reward delivery system which cannot be used on the Steam Client nor on mobile if you are behind an adblocker proxy/DNS, new cards not being added on the Collection Track immediately after release, the practically nonexistent outsourced customer support that cycles the same premade answers to customers, along with soft and hard censorship of dissent and criticism on their official Discord server. Where exactly is the money from players going, then? We do not even have an automated account recovery system for people that keep losing their progress, even if they paid for something in-game, instead forcing players to sometimes have to wait days for a response.
Related: When Did Spending Thousands of Dollars in Video Games Become the New Normal?
Second Dinner has been dead silent on quite a few issues and backlashes recently. Let’s talk about the Darkhawk Series position. If we followed the old, data mined Series Drop Schedule, Darkhawk should have been Series 3 by now and would cost 1000 Tokens. Great buy for every new player, because Darkhawk is a decently powerful card you can build a deck around and contend for Infinite rank with, even without many Series 4 and Series 5 cards. Now, they have made Darkhawk stay in Series 4 (costing 3000 Collector’s Tokens), and have implemented an optional paywall for those who want to succumb to their fear of missing out, because who knows when the RNGesus will assign Darkhawk to you through Collector’s Reserve if you don’t pay for it directly?
When you first start playing Marvel Snap, the card acquisition seems easy-peasy, but when you get out of your honeymoon phase, you hit the ground. Hard. It becomes more tempting to open your wallet and boost your progress “just this once”, but then you realize that the boost wasn’t nearly as good as you wanted.
A lot of other issues keep happening in the game, too. We wrote about Marvel Snap players frustrated after the sudden delay of High Evolutionary cards (when High Evolutionary cards just didn’t release with seemingly no explanation), Zabu and Silver Surfer being nerfed (when they nerfed Zabu and Silver Surfer after the Zabu season and battlepass ended), and asked when Kitty Pryde would return to Marvel Snap (When Kitty literally crashed the game), but we can’t possibly cover each and every one of their mishaps, there are better things to do. Other, more positive things to be precise. Every time, we get a shorthanded apology and, occasionally, some laughable compensation (hey, at least they gave Kitty Pryde to everyone for free). It took them over half a year to implement purchase confirmations and they had a no-tolerance policy for accidental purchase refund requests, as if changing the values of someone’s account might cause a collapse like a game of Jenga.
I am calling it now: if things don’t drastically change in Marvel Snap, the game will simply roll down a cliff in the most Hollywood-esque way; tumbling down to the bottom of the ravine, only to explode into a fiery ball like you’re watching a Michael Bay movie.
According to Steam Charts, the active player count has, on average, slowly decreased since February of this year. For Android and iOS, I sadly do not have any data, but I presume that there are more players on those two platforms, since the game is meant to be a mobile experience primarily. Recent reviews are mostly negative on the Google Play Store. Recently, I oftentimes match up against the same people match after match, or against bots, which indicates that people are leaving.
In my opinion, Marvel Snap requires too much money in order to skip ahead and become fully competitive, unless you want to commit to the grind. It’s way past previous points I’ve made about the number of indie games you could buy with that amount, and you should not be stuck to your screen for that long. I am lucky that I picked up the game early enough, so I have access to almost all of the cards (missing three cards from Series 4 and 10 cards from Series 5) but I cannot see myself playing it from scratch now. If “senior” players keep abandoning the game and new ones do not feel the incentive to stay, there’s gonna be a problem.
Hopefully, Second Dinner changes course and starts acting more player and consumer-friendly, so that Marvel Snap doesn’t potentially shut down like Marvel Avengers. If you are still into this game, check out Spider-Ham – New Marvel Snap Card – Showcase, Decks, Counters, Synergies and New Marvel Snap Card Datamine – August 2023 – Daken, Lady Deathstrike, Silver Samurai, X-23, or other content at our game tag below.
