So Marvel Snap Is A Pay2Win Cash-Grab After All...

Well, I feel a little stupid now. Just a few days ago, I did an article talking about Marvel Snap, giving it some praise for finally being a collectible card game that is not strictly Pay2Win but that actually found a way to gate progress in the game through actually playing it. Well, it seems like their game studio read my article, and they sure weren't happy about what I had to say.

While it's possible that it didn't happen exactly that way, I certainly couldn't have been more wrong with my statement. When I logged in today to play a few rounds, I was greeted by that "awesome" new Pro Bundle:

Yes, that's €120 they are asking for right there, in dollar value that's about $130. That's the cost of two AAA games... and then some! While the asking price itself is already absurd no matter what you get for it, it gets even crazier when you look at the actual "value" you get in return!

If you don't know how Marvel Snap works, you need boosters to upgrade your cards and you need credits to pay for these upgrades. Every card upgrade increases your collection level and every now and then, you earn a new card to play with when your collection level increases. So what is that ~250 collection level going to do for you? Well, it depends a bit on what your current level is, but once you progressed a bit into the game, you earn a card roughly every 20 collection level, so that would translate to maybe 12-13 cards for the average account.

Now if you translate that to a per card cost, that's about $10 for each and every single card. Keep in mind that this is no blockchain game either. These cards aren't actually yours, you can't transfer or sell them. If you stop playing the game or they shut down the servers, these cards are simply gone.

Of cause the company has to earn money to keep the game going and I fully understand that it's a free to play game with premium purchases. But just take a look at other deals they have in store:

Now that's a reasonably priced offer - about $3.6 for an avatar, a card variant and some premium currency. That's something I can totally get behind offering and something I'd even consider buying. But $130 for 12-13 new cards? Frankly, that's outrageous. Not only that, though, I think it's a cheap move to extract money from people that don't know any better. Keep in mind that this is a mobile game, it's probably played by a lot of kids and at least some of them will be tempted to get the deal without their parents knowing.

It also outright breaks the promise of not being a Pay2Win game and instead turns it into one of these classic mobile cash grabs. Of course you can earn everything for free if you put in enough time. Or you just pay us ridiculous amounts of money and just skip the line. It's also interesting that this offer is coming now that the game hat some weeks to really build hype and get more and more people hooked. As I noted in my original article, it's really good at getting people addicted and it got even me into a position where I cared more for that next collection level than I did care for the actual game. How very convenient that they now finally offer a chance to buy these collection levels in a meaningful way directly from the shop.

I for one am not going to support this game any longer and decided to uninstall it right after finishing this article. It really serves to show where the conventional gaming companies are at. Everything they do is aimed at extracting as much money as possible out of their players. There's no reason to offer that deal at that price. They could ask for half of it, a third, a quarter. No matter, there's no real value created or retained, these digital items cost what ever they ask for and once you've spent the money they are worth zero. But instead of trying to offer some fair deals, they just try and make as much money as possible as quickly as they can. I don't want anything to do with that!

So that's the end of my journey in Marvel Snap and I truly regret giving it a somewhat positive review just a few days ago. I can only advise everybody to stay as far away as possible from cash grabs like that, don't give them their attention, don't waste your time on it, they don't really care to entertain you, they only want to hook you up so they can take your money. It's disgusting, really.

And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!