#Blaugust2023 I Concede, or How to Lose a Marvel Snap Fan
I have over 200 hours played in Marvel Snap on Steam, but I primarily play on mobile. Since its release, I have played virtually every day. I reached top rank the last three months in a row. I have purchased every season pass since I started, and spent more money than I wish to count on bundles and variants.
But today, I concede: I am uninstalling and moving on.
The game isn’t less fun than when I started. If anything, I find it more fun - at the moment. The current meta feels varied and since I have most of the cards unlocked, I play a different deck every day.
If anything, it is a reaction to the volatility of playing Marvel Snap. The meta changes drastically from patch to patch or new card to new card. The game’s economy has been modified multiple times since launch. Nothing feels settled or defined. Even the bundles that cost real money (and even the ones that don’t) have no set costs, and have skewed more and more expensive as the game goes along. Plus, the previously mentioned Spotlight Caches work best only if you save them in advance, waiting for the week where the rewards give you an optimal shot at something you hope to obtain.
With the recent roadmap, I only see the game getting worse not better. There are currently three tiers of variants: Rare, Super Rare, and Ultimate. The latter do not feel ultimate beyond their difficulty in obtaining - they require a special currency that is also used to acquire new cards which is often a more meaningful thing to do for most players. Now they want to add Mythic, an additional tier of variant, that promises special effects and other things that I can only assume will be incredibly expensive and that Ultimates won’t ever get the love they deserve.
One of the few things I would love to have - the ability to customize the look of a card once it has been upgraded to control for borders and special effects - is viewed as a confusing change since it would no longer preserve the association of a cards border with how much it has been upgraded. These upgrades are purely cosmetic, mind you, so this is a silly reason not to allow the option.
How might this be relevant to management and project management?
First, roadmaps are great, but they should be a constant information radiator available to stakeholders, not something you reveal six months after launch (simultaneous to a survey that you haven’t had time to process yet). Second, if your idea of listening to stakeholders is to give them the bare minimum of what they ask for, worse, to take something away to justify a change, then you need to do a damn good job of managing that communication or else you risk polluting your community with mistrust, resentment, and the feeling of being manipulated.