brendan halpin

I’ve been playing Marvel SNAP for close to three years. If you’re not familiar, Marvel SNAP is a card battling video game where you play cards with Marvel superheroes and villains, each of which has a point value and most of which have abilities that affect the game.

Games usually take about five minutes, so it’s a really good casual game to play on your phone. You can win without spending a ton of money, and the developers seem to really put a lot of effort into keeping the game competitive.

….and, I think it’s going to die.

Because Marvel SNAP depends on players spending money to get cool variants (the same card you already have, but with a different picture) or entirely new cards. They launch a new set of cards every four or five weeks. They call these “seasons,” and if you pay ten bucks for a season, you’re guaranteed to get some new cards.

So the primary way this game makes money is by getting players to pay money for new cards. Which presents a problem: the business model demands infinite growth, but neither the IP nor the game design will support that.

Every recognizable Marvel character already has a card. So if part of the fun of the game for you is playing cards that feature your favorite characters, you know at this point that you’re never seeing any more.

They’re starting to do new versions of old characters with slightly different abilities. So right now, for example, they’ve got Star Lord: Master of the Sun, which a) makes me start singing “Dayman” in my head and b) is the third Star Lord card they’ve released. But even as they release new cards for old characters, they’re trying to give them new abilities, but the game is simple enough that most of the good abilities have already been assigned to a card, so the card descriptions are getting longer and more intricate which directly contrasts with the simplicity of the gameplay.

The motivations for getting a new card boil down to either “this unlocks a new way to play the game” or “this strengthens my existing strategy.” There was a bit of buzz when the Marvel Zombies dropped in October, satisfying the former motivation, but nothing really essential for the second motivation.

What this means is that since October of ‘25, nobody’s had a whole lot of motivation to get new cards. And it doesn’t look like the situation is going to get any better. It used to be that they’d launch a new card and people who had that card would mop the floor with you, and you’d have to get that card or a reasonable defense for it in order to stay competitive. That’s just not the case anymore.

Which is fine! It’s still a fun game! I could happily play with just these cards more or less forever! But since the business model depends on endless growth, I think we’ve reached a crisis point.

So it’s basically a microcosm of capitalism, is what I’m saying. Trying to milk endless growth out of finite resources is a fool’s errand, and capitalism as a whole seems to be at the same place as Marvel Snap. They keep trying to convince us that we need some new thing, or that the next consumer revolution is upon us, but they haven’t introduced anything that’s a real game changer since the smartphone in ‘08.

Whereas it used to seem like the breakneck pace of advancement would never let up, there are now legal adults who’ve grown up wihout any really significant advances in technology. (Yes, I am aware of the AI “revolution” but remain unconvinced that it’s a real thing anymore than the blockchain “revolution” was. Just because a lot of credulous dopes have invested money into something doesn’t mean it’s got real value.)

The frustrating thing is that everybody knows this. Nothing grows forever, especially nothing that’s built on resources that can’t grow forever. So maybe it’s time we stop pretending that endless growth is a real thing.