Inside the Marvel Snap Developer Layoffs That Have Fans Predicting the Worst

The news came in bits and pieces, as these things now frequently do. This is a post on LinkedIn. On X, a brief, cautious farewell. It was evident that something had occurred within Second Dinner, the Irvine-based studio that created one of the most captivating mobile card games of the previous few years, by the time the larger Marvel Snap community made the connection last week. People were missing from their desks. Griffin Bennett, the community manager, had left. According to what former employees have posted online, so were others, dispersed throughout engineering, QA, and community roles.

On May 1, the studio’s co-founder and most recognizable face, Ben Brode, finally broke the silence on the official Discord channel. He was deliberate in his word choice, much like someone who knows that every word they say will be captured on camera. He wrote, “We said goodbye to a few members of our team yesterday,” describing the choices as difficult and emphasizing that the individuals departing were gifted and cherished. Second Dinner is still being built, committed, and present, he insisted. He claimed that the March roadmap remained the same.

It’s another matter entirely if players trust him. Scrolling through the Marvel Snap subreddit gives the impression that a small change has occurred. Not quite panic. It’s more akin to the gradual realization that live-service game fans typically experience after experiencing enough setbacks. Some remain faithful. Others have already declared their completion in lengthy, somewhat theatrical posts. Within hours, a thread with the title “I will stop supporting the game after these layoffs” received dozens of comments.

The figures by themselves are not disastrous. Less than ten of Second Dinner’s 200 employees may have been impacted by the layoffs. This is a much more subdued event in an industry that has witnessed studios like Highguard completely fail. However, context is important. Due to monetization disputes and the general weariness that comes with any card game once the novelty wears off, Marvel Snap has been losing players for some time. Already, the March roadmap acknowledged that issues needed to be resolved. Regardless of how the studio presents them, layoffs five weeks later appear more like turbulence than a course correction.

Here, it’s difficult to avoid thinking about the team’s beginnings. After leaving Blizzard, Brode and a number of his co-founders contributed to the success of Hearthstone. The idea behind Second Dinner was to create a more relaxed, agile, and corporate-free version of that experience.

That was how it appeared for a while. When Snap debuted in 2022, it was surrounded by genuine warmth—the kind of buzz a game receives when its design feels new and its developers appear to genuinely care. Four years later, it is more difficult to sustain that goodwill, particularly since the individuals who carried a large portion of that community-facing voice are no longer employed.

As these statements typically do, Brode’s statement relied heavily on assurance. The problem is that when reassurance is given frequently enough, it begins to sound suspicious. Variations of “we’re still here, still building” have been heard by fans from innumerable studios that quietly closed down a year later. Second Dinner is not moving in that direction, though. The Daredevil season debuts on schedule, updates continue to come in, and the studio’s core principles remain intact. Nevertheless, it’s hard to ignore the pattern as this develops. Rarely do live-service games end abruptly. They float.