In the current mobile gaming landscape, it’s safe to assume almost every free live-service game is pay-to-win. However, while gacha games are blatantly pay-to-win and often extremely aggressive in their monetization, other games like Marvel Snap take a different approach. So, is Marvel Snap pay-to-win? Here’s a rundown of how the game monetization works.
Is Marvel Snap Pay to Win?
Marvel Snap is not pay-to-win, as the monetization centers primarily around cosmetics and card variants.
Paying can help you progress faster, but there are caps to the daily amount of Credits and Gold that players can purchase. Faster progress means collecting different cards faster by upgrading and boosting your collection level. However, the game’s matchmaking considers a player’s collection of cards (Collection Level), so there is theoretically no advantage to having more cards.
The only argument one might have for Marvel Snap being pay-to-win is that the Season Pass card is locked behind a paywall. However, that card gets added to the regular card pool two seasons later. In other words, at any given time, only two cards are paywalled, and they have not been any game-changing cards thus far. This means that all players, regardless of whether or not they spend money, will be able to obtain a full card collection eventually.
So, let’s say you’ve got cash to burn–can you pay to win? No, not really. Yes, you can increase your collection level a bit faster, which gets you a random mystery card every few tiers, but these cards are random from a card collection pool.
You are never guaranteed to get the card you need, so it’s not even possible to pay-to-win.
If we had to label Marvel Snap’s monetization model, it would probably be “pay to have variety more quickly.” In our opinion, Marvel Snap is in no way a P2W game, which is a breath of fresh air and probably frustrating to mobile game developers who practice predatory monetization.
For more guides and walkthroughs, check out our Marvel Snap Section.
