// KOTAKU — GAMING
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.