The rough launch of PC Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls was hardly surprising

So it’s now been a week – to the day – since Sony’s latest live service title for the PS5 and PC was officially released: Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls was announced over a year ago and it’s always been considered promising, as it features both an absolutely breathtaking art style and a bold 4-versus-4 tag team mechanic never before seen in a fighting game. It clearly had a lot of potential – despite some controversial choices Arc System Works made early on – based on its Marvel IP alone. It even landed close to the huge success of the latest Spider-man movie in the box office, something that could have easily helped it in the way it boosted sales of other Marvel games on PlayStation in the same timeframe.

Yet, according to research firm Alinea Analytics, Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls failed to break 500K copies sold in its first week across PS5 and PC. This is not a bad number for a fighting game: it’s a niche genre, after all, where even the most established franchises almost never reach a million sales during their launch window. It’s also true that some of the estimates Alinea Analytics publishes from time to time have been off the mark, especially when it comes to PlayStation releases.

Still, for a game to address almost 100 million PlayStation gamers and around 150 million PC gamers, sport some of the most recognizable Marvel characters in history, release mere days after Spider-man: Brand New Day broke box office records and still not reach half a million copies sold, something must have gone wrong… and it has.

Simply put, what kept Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls from reaching higher sales was the type and number of technical issues the PC version of the game suffered from at launch – as well as two choices Sony and Arc System Works made for that version that a lot of consumers using computers, well, did not like. More importantly, both facts highlight what yours truly and others consider to be a much bigger problem: the way PC gamers are still treated in 2026 – something that becomes easily apparent once anyone takes a look at the timeline of what could have been an exceptional launch of an exceptional game… but wasn’t.

Here’s what happened and why – and how things must change in order for it to not happen again.

How it started: a problematic PC launch causing immediate backlash online

In order to understand why things went wrong with Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls on PC, one can simply recall what happened during the open beta that took place in July 24th-26th. PC gamers eager to play it for the very first time tried to do so as soon as this, supposedly near-complete, version came online… only to face network errors, frustratingly low frame rates regardless of PC specs, instability, microstuttering and more. These are issues one would normally expect of an early-access PC game, not one scheduled to launch on August 6th.

PlayStation Network requirement and Linux incompatibility concerns aside, even purely from a technical standpoint the test PC version of Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls just wasn’t ready for release within 15 days of that weekend. That much was clear – and this is where a big part of the problem discussed in this story actually lies: while most people already understood that it would be extremely hard to get the game in good shape in such a short amount of time, they were more or less still expected to take the public apology Arc System Works posted (“Message received”) seriously and buy the game regardless.

Miracles of that sort only happen in movies, though. Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls launched on August 6th as initially planned and, sure enough, the majority of PC gamers immediately started reporting the exact same issues highlighted during the open beta (a day-one patch did not seem to help in any meaningful way). The backlash was immediate and huge, since many fighting games fans, streamers and influencers prefer to play these titles on PC rather than on console (more flexible display options and lower network latency).

Two days in, reviews of Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls on Steam were Mostly Negative, tournaments planning to use the PC version switched to the PS5 one, while famous FGC figures such as Maximilian or SonicFox publicly dismissed its PC version as “unplayable” online. That’s not how any AAA game should come to market, let alone a Sony-funded, Marvel-branded one that’s supposedly planned to be supported “for a decade”.

How it’s going: the first update a step in the right direction, more needed

To its credit, Arc System Works readily acknowledged the technical issues the PC version of Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls suffered from – it had no other option given how widespread the negative reports were – and promised to “look into them”. Yours truly strongly believes that developers were well aware of most or possibly all of those problems already as, just four days after the game launched, ArcSys offered its first important patch for the PC version, supposedly addressing most of the issues reported.

Technical issues like microstuttering, though, or inexplicably low/unstable frame rates on powerful PCs, don’t just “get fixed” in four days. Solving such problems usually takes longer – testing code changes alone takes at least a couple of days, even armed with more usage data than during the open beta period of the game. While yours truly cannot definitively prove this, if he’d have to guess he’d say that work on many of those reported issues most probably began before Sony and Arc System Works released the PC version of Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls. Which makes initially selling it in that state questionable at best, unacceptable at worst.

In any case, yours truly installed this patch the day it was released, went back to all three systems he did his original testing on and run the game again without changing anything else (such as Windows files or graphics cards drivers). What he found out pretty much aligns with most other PC gamers have reported over the next few days: things have definitely improved in terms of microstuttering and frame rate numbers, but there’s still frame rate instability that doesn’t make sense on the more capable PCs of the three – while random crashes are now a rare occurrence, but can still happen from time to time.

Meanwhile, the less capable of the three systems yours truly tested is still unable to offer the seamless, trouble-free Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls experience the standard PS5 does, while still looking worse on a 4K TV. Arc System Works released the first patch for the PS5/PS5 Pro version of the game too, but it mostly delivered fixes for trivial issues – a testament to the preferential treatment Sony’s systems got as the leading platform for this game. At the time of writing PS5 gamers continue to avoid playing Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls with PC gamers online, as the technical issues the PC version of the title still suffers from affect both ranked and casual matches.

It will be a while before it becomes clear whether the rough PC launch of Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls did irreparable damage to its long-term prospects or not. Steam reviews for the title were still Mixed at the time of writing – up by a few percentage points to 48% Positive, from the all-time low of around 60% Negative – but the game is not out of the woods yet: many PC gamers are still reporting various technical issues, especially when it comes to online multiplayer but not necessarily related to that aspect of the game alone. More testing and fixing is clearly required before this title can live up to its full potential on PC.

What comes – or should come – next for this, and every other, PC game going forward

It’s a sad state of affairs, to be sure, because Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls really is one of the most impressive fighting games ever released: its visuals are unmatched, its presentation is top-notch, its single-player content is extensive, its game options are many and varied, its gameplay is both inviting and deep. Now that a number of proper reviews from various outlets are out, its Metacritic score for the PS5 version is sitting at 86/100 and, honestly, it deserves even higher than that. But how things played out in terms of the PC version of the game will always mean that its launch was not ideal – far from it, in fact, as its multiplayer component was negatively affected even on the PS5 side of things due to netcode and the nature of cross-play.

Setting Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls aside for a minute, though, it’s now absolutely necessary to stress that developers and publishers releasing console and computer versions of their games just can’t keep treating PC gamers as second-class citizens anymore. This is the crowd that had to put up with substandard ports of AAA console games for decades, the same crowd that’s involuntarily used for beta testing Windows for years, the same crowd that’s expected to pay full price for a new game… but, for some reason, to also not complain all that much when said game needs half a year’s worth of patches and fixes to work as intended, because “that’s how things are in PC gaming” apparently.

That is exactly what happened with Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls: most of the technical issues of its PC version were widely reported during the late July open beta, two weeks before launch, but they were simply not addressed at all until after the game was released. Since Sony funded the development of the game, the PS5 was naturally the lead development platform, yes (so… priorities). The marketing and commercial reasons why it’s better for a game to launch on all supported formats at once are also easily understood. But was the way things played out beneficial to anyone involved, including Sony and ArcSys? Wouldn’t it have been better if the PC version was released e.g. a mere week later, with its first update already in place and a clear plan for further improvement officially shared?

On top of that, the fact that any given title’s lead platform is a console does not mean that PC gamers cannot expect more. Linux compatibility, for instance, if there is no technical reason against it, is not too much to ask in 2026 – certainly not something Arc System Works should be dismissing offhandedly. The irony here, obviously, is that Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls could potentially run better under the Proton compatibility layer than on Windows 11 (especially on lower-spec PCs). The PSN account requirement is a Sony policy issue – so a different discussion altogether – but it would be great if the company decided to offer PC gamers not interested in PlayStation services the option to enjoy online multiplayer outside of its own ecosystem… at some point.

Regardless of that – or of Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls in particular – it’s high time all major video games publishers started treating the PC version of their titles as one deserving the same level of polish and optimization, the same kind of care really, as any other. Developers have become way too comfortable with the “ship now, fix later” approach – allowed by publishers, obviously – doing a great disservice to a gaming community that, despite everything, has shown great tolerance and loyalty over the years.

Last but not least, both developers and publishers would do well to take this possibility into account: the PC market is going through a rough patch in terms of hardware availability and pricing right now, sure. But if the next PlayStation and Xbox prove to be as costly as it now seems they will, then gaming PCs could easily emerge as a true alternative and an even more flexible, attractive way of enjoying modern, high-quality titles. When that time comes, those publishers that treated PC gamers with respect in previous years will be much better positioned to capitalize on such a market change. Worth keeping that in mind too, no?