Winning Lapsed Players Back
Product:
Marvel Snap
Duration:
May to August 2025
Role:
Senior UX Designer
Problem
When returning to Marvel Snap, the core issues for lapsed players are that they are likely behind in card acquisition, and the pace they can acquire new cards is slow. With their card collections lagging behind the current meta, players feel less motivated to engage as deeply with the game. As a result, many players drop off again shortly after returning to the game.
Goals
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Re-engage players in the core loop quickly and help them win early and often.
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Drive retention and conversion through personalized offers and reward pacing.
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Create a cohesive, low-friction UX across all winback touchpoints.
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Leverage existing systems where possible to minimize development cost.
Approach
We set out to design a winback system that made returning to Marvel Snap feel both exciting and rewarding. To keep development costs low, we aimed to add additional progression and rewards to existing systems in the game that already encouraged daily engagement. It was also important to support easy discoverability of those additional features since they were across multiple places in the metagame. While parallel workstreams took place that reconfigured reward designs for increased card acquisition and softened loss curves, I focused on these key components:
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Curated First-Session Flow: Returning players needed to be given a clean first session that prioritized clarity and relevance. I collaborated with our marketing and live-ops team to filter or delay certain marketing and seasonal communications, and prioritized first showing players a winback-specific login calendar and hub interface.
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Returning Challenge: Integrated directly into the existing Missions system, a new progression track was layered on top of the existing Weekly Challenges that increased the rewards granted for reengagement with the game’s core loop.
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Exclusive Offers: Offered curated bundles focused on card acquisition, as well as a one-time discounted Season Pass and Super Premium Season Pass purchase to encourage longer retention.
Together, these features provided players with immediate, celebratory rewards, clear short-term goals, the ability to rebuild their collection momentum, and lucrative incentives for sticking around longer.
My Impact
As the Senior UX Designer, I led the experience design for the winback system and collaborated closely with Product, Art, Tech Art, and Marketing teams to deliver a cohesive system.
Curated First-Session Flow
I helped shape the initial login experience, driving conversations with Product and Marketing to align in-app messaging and suppress irrelevant promotions so the return flow felt concise and targeted. This also included deeper curation of promotion material in in-app marketing channels.
Upon logging back in after 45 days, players will immediately be met with exciting imagery and a claimable reward from a login calendar full of incentives for sticking around. We then intentionally funnel players to the Winback hub interface, where they can see each of the event’s individual components in one place.
New Login Bonus Calendar
To meet the requirements of the event's reward design, I reimagined the existing login bonus calendar system to support more content. This included a visual update to the UI, as well as more extensive content-authoring tooling for reusing the calendar in other live events.
Winback Hub
I advocated for a central hub that aggregated all winback content — login calendar, return missions, discounted Season Pass, and bundles — into a single, highly visible interface. This aimed to reduce friction for players coming back to the game who may have otherwise become overwhelmed with the amount of new content available to them.
The hub not only provided a holistic view of all winback features, including their individual durations, but also simplified navigation and discovery of existing systems by deep-linking to relevant systems of the game. The hub was also made accessible from a semi-permanent event badge on the main menu of the game for the duration of the event.
Event Theme
I partnered closely with the Art team to develop a bespoke visual theme anchored around a popular Marvel character who would welcome players back into the game. Using market research on fan favorites, we selected the right hero with the right tone–Gwenpool. Her character brand was then expanded to artwork across various UIs for a cohesive experience for both mobile and PC platforms.
Final Screens
Results
The team was able to see small increases in retention and lifetime value after two weeks, with plans to continue to monitor these metrics. What was most notable was a significant improvement in bundle sales without any major marketing pushes. This has given the team more confidence in continuing to invest in ways to further optimize the event and find more ways to deliver value to players.
Player sentiment has trended neutral to positive, with the loudest feedback being that non-Winback-eligible players simply want access to winback bundles themselves because of how much value they deliver.