Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls Is Still Fighting For Its Life On Steam

It’s been roughly six weeks since Arc System Works and Sony released Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls out into the wild. That’s still early days for estimating the longevity of a fighting game, but news of Marvel Tōkon’s sales numbers and its frankly abysmal Steam chart paint a picture of a game in free-fall decline on PC. 

Reviews were good for Marvel Tōkon at launch, at least on the console side where it’s a PlayStation 5 exclusive. With an 85 Metacritic score and a 94 percent on OpenCritic, plenty of AAA games in 2026 would be jealous. Unfortunately, players on Steam didn’t have quite the same experience, with a litany of performance issues on PC landing the game at a pretty abysmal 44 percent positive rating. Things haven’t improved too much in the weeks since. Marvel Tōkon’s Steam rating still sits at just 49 percent positive.

But before the why, let’s talk about the how–as in, how is it possible this game has dropped off so hard? In a recent report published by Alinea Analytics, it was claimed that Marvel Tōkon had only sold an estimated 740,000 copies “across all platforms.”

Likewise, the Steam numbers are, frankly, shocking. I personally put a lot less stake in SteamDB chart numbers than most seem to, but even I have to admit that Marvel Tōkon dipping into the three-figure territory over this weekend is cause for alarm. That’s a peak of almost 25,000 at launch, all the way down to, as of today, 994 players.

Marvel Tokon 24-hour peak falls under 1,000 players for the first time ever

The devs apologized to the PC users and are releasing stability updates pic.twitter.com/8IGEkSn9bK

— Moonsault Slayer (@VolSkimmer) September 18, 2026

It also gets worse when you compare the figures to Arc System Works’ last fighting game, Guilty Gear Strive. Roughly a month after launch, Strive had sold over 500,000 copies–a figure that is directly comparable to Marvel Tōkon, as both games were only available on PlayStation and PC at launch.

This might sound like good news, as it means that Marvel Tōkon appears to be outselling Guilty Gear Strive. However, the fact that a Marvel game–inarguably one of the most recognisable media properties in existence–is neck and neck with Strive isn’t exactly a flex. Plus, Strive currently has more active players on Steam, with a 24-hour peak of 1,784 players. This is a five-year-old game we’re talking about here.

Alright, onto the why–as in, why is nobody playing this game on PC? Well, there are the aforementioned performance issues, but that doesn’t paint the full picture. Marvel Tōkon earned a rather negative helping of scrutiny, both before and during release, due to news of the game being region-locked to only 132 countries on Steam. Likewise, many blamed the beta test’s performance issues on Sony’s always-online DRM, which forced users to sign in using a PlayStation account to access Marvel Tōkon’s online features. Several users online also pointed to pirated copies of the game running better on PC to prove that DRM was tanking people’s framerates.

Tokon really should have been at the minimum like 50% of dbfzs hype/players but not gonna lie I don’t even think we even got strives success. The pc launch absolutely destroyed the momentum of the game. Active tag is just so tired at this point and only 4 char a year ? Looks sad https://t.co/4iQ9I5tmzM

— HookGangGod (@HookGangGod) September 11, 2026

Of course, the performance issues on PC are the main sticking point here. While the August 10 patch seemed to fix some PC players’ issues, others haven’t been quite as lucky. Arc System Works has released four new patches since then, and every single one makes some reference to “improving the PC version of the game” in the patch notes. And yet, based on the comments on X for the September 18 patch, multiple players are still running into performance issues.

This also might explain Arc System Works’ producer Takeshi Yamanaka apologizing to PC players for the shoddy launch, and quite literally praying that they return to give it a second chance: “So the team will continue to work together as one to try to provide a game that the players can enjoy even more than the initial version of the game. And all we can do is do our best and pray that that sentiment will reach the player base.”

Arc System Works apologized for a second time recently as well, but this time via a post on the Steam store page on September 14, in which the director stated that the team “sincerely apologize for the frustration” that Marvel Tōkon’s lackluster launch caused. Kind of seems like the studio is well aware of the fact that the numbers Marvel Tōkon is currently pulling are not sustainable for a game with a DLC roadmap that ends in September 2027.

So, now on to the what–as in, what are the chances that Sony and Arc System Works choose to continue supporting this game past 2027? Honestly, I’m 50/50 on it. It’s hard for any game to overcome a bad launch, but Arc System Works does have a habit of supporting their games long beyond their intended shelf lives.

Dragon Ball FighterZ, a game that was released in 2018, got a new DLC character in April this year, so anything truly is possible. Still, as much as I love Marvel Tōkon, dropping down from a peak of 25,000 players to under 1,000 in the space of six weeks would be a death sentence for any other online game. Maybe it’ll see a burst of activity once Cyclops releases in a month, but said burst might be more akin to a dead cat bounce than a new lease of life.