Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls beta hits record Steam players despite PC performance problems

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls ran an open beta over a weekend in late July 2026 on PS5 and PC, ahead of the game's full launch on August 6 ^{[1, 2, 3]}. The beta attracted a peak concurrent player count of 33,233 on Steam, surpassing Street Fighter 6's 32,787 and Tekken 8's 15,035, setting a new high for fighting game betas ^{[4, 5, 6]}.

Despite strong engagement, the PC version suffered significant performance issues. Players experienced high CPU usage, frequent frame drops, stuttering, glitchy visuals, shader compilation delays, and forced PlayStation Network sign-in ^{[1, 2, 7, 3, 5, 6]}. These problems caused frustration, with one player on Reddit calling the state "inexcusable" and saying they would not buy until fixes were released ^[5].

Arc System Works publicly apologized for the PC issues during the beta. They said their team is "actively investigating these issues and working on a fix" and promised meaningful improvements by launch day ^{[1, 3, 5, 6]}. The developer shared community-tested troubleshooting steps including shader warm-up, Nvidia and display settings tweaks, and disabling recording software, but warned these were not guaranteed fixes ^{[3, 5]}.

The performance problems may stem partly from anti-cheat and PlayStation services running constantly in the background, increasing CPU load ^{[1, 2, 7, 5]}. Online play on PS5 was also affected by a PlayStation Network outage on the beta's first day and subsequent server maintenance ^[2]. Marvel Tokon requires PC players to sign into PlayStation Network to play online, which blocks availability in over 100 countries ^{[1, 3, 6]}.

Character popularity data from the beta showed Magik as the top pick among high-ranked players, followed by Blade, Magneto, and Spider-Man. Danger and Ms Marvel were among the least popular characters overall ^{[8, 2, 4]}.

Arc System Works stated the beta aimed to find and fix bugs prior to the full release scheduled for August 6, 2026 ^{[1, 3, 5]}. The company reaffirmed commitment to resolving PC performance issues with fixes planned for the day-one version ^[6].