Marvel Snap developer Second Dinner has outlined its 2025 plans to fix one of the biggest problems plaguing the collectible card game.
Marvel Snap has been my most-played game of each year since its May 2022 beta release. While I still play the game daily, I, as well as many others, have had growing frustrations with the game this year. Modes like Deadpool’s Diner have been disappointing, but more importantly, acquiring new cards has become extremely frustrating. A new Marvel Snap card comes out every week, but players earn tokens to purchase them at an extremely slow rate. Spotlight caches that contain new cards get filled with unhelpful fodder or duplicates that grant only 1,000 tokens, while “Series Drops” that make existing cards easier to acquire typically only happen to cards that aren’t meta-relevant.
This all makes keeping up with the meta an expensive task for hardcore players and a nearly impossible one for new players. Second Dinner has mostly stayed silent on these complaints since it introduced Spotlight Caches. but admitted card acquisition was an issue in a blog post ahead of the winter holidays. In a post on X, Second Dinner said it plans on addressing issues like the “overall lack of agency in acquiring new cards” and “the randomness of the Spotlight Cache system feeling frustrating.”
Second Dinner says it wants to fix these issues with the game and has solutions in mind. Its journey to correct these problems will begin with January’s Marvel Snap patch, where the game will be “doubling the drop rate of Series 3 cards in Collector’s Reserves, from 2 out of every 9 to 4 out of every 9,” and “increasing the token payout from Spotlight Cache duplicates from 1000 tokens to 2000 tokens.” A large “series drop” of cards, which essentially makes dropped cards cheaper to acquire, is also planned for the first quarter of 2025.
More substantial changes are coming after that, although Second Dinner admits that “rebuilding some core aspects of Snap takes time to get right.” As a result, the developer admits “it will take a few months” before card acquisition in Marvel Snap feels fully fixed.
Marvel Snap is available now for PC, iOS, and Android.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.