Marvel Snap has been one of the bigger hits of 2022, and is a unique take on the digital CCG genre. Emphasising quicker playtime and a different style of monetisation, for publisher Nuverse – the videogame publisher side of Tiktok owner Bytedance – it’s been a great success.

As the game's success continues to be analised key development figures have spoken up across a variety of outlets and Senior Director of Global Business Tom Van Damn made an appearance on Venturebeat discussing the company’s plans for the future.

Aside from boasting of Marvel Snap’s role as their “flagship title” in the West, he also discussed key insights into the wider gaming market and how Nuverse will handle its contraction. We want to pull out a couple of interesting quotes to analyse, to give a better understanding of what the future holds in store for Nuverse…

Key Takeaways

He noted the company’s strong stable of IP’s which they have licensing deals for, “One Piece is a good example, and we have a deal with Electronic Arts for the Red Alert IP in China. Marvel, of course, is a great one. And so there are many of these. So I think we started strong, but there definitely will be even more as we go into the future.”

One Piece is of course the mega-hit manga and multimedia franchise that has spanned almost a quarter of a century and remains as popular now as it ever has been. Even for lesser-known IP’s such as Red Alert (the Command & Conquer spin-off), Van Dam noted it had seen success in their initial release market of China. Securing as lucrative a licence as Marvel, who’s movies remain a massive success, is an indication of outside confidence that Nuverse has a competent stable of developers to put on these projects.

Speaking of their developers, Van Dam was also confident about pointing to their company’s philosophy towards their development staff “What Nuverse is trying to do is prioritise developer success. Because if we can have two people that are good at what they do, in their particular genre, make the game that they think is right, that usually translates into something that players want to play. And that allows you to, even in a perhaps contracting market, still have a game that’s really interesting for players to play and generally drives success.”

It’s not altogether surprising that Van Dam indicates their developer-focused approach to games. One of the key advertising steps during Marvel Snap’s release was to promote the involvement of Hearthstone Game Director Ben Brode. Although his involvement in the creatives was criticised by some industry analysts like Matej Lancaric, he is relatively well-known to existing CCG enthusiasts due to his high visibility role in Hearthstone.

Overall, whilst the entire interview was packed with interesting questions and even more interesting answers, it seems quite clear that Nuverse has a lot more in store. Being the video game arm of Bytedance, it’ll be key for it to display its worth as their parent company buckles down into 2023 after a fresh round of layoffs.