132 Countries Can't Buy Marvel Tokon on PC

Over half the world's countries can't buy Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls on PC. According to the game's SteamDB listing, 132 countries are locked out of purchasing Arc System Works' upcoming fighter on Steam, and the reason is one Sony should be intimately familiar with by now: PlayStation Network isn't available in any of them.

The restriction was first flagged by fighting game news account Special Cancel and picked up by ResetEra users, who noticed the "Not in 132 countries" tag on the SteamDB page for each of the game's editions. The blocked list includes Jamaica, Iran, Belarus, Egypt, Nigeria, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and over a hundred more. Every single one lines up with countries where PSN doesn't officially operate. The game also appears blocked on the Epic Games Store in those same regions. Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls requires a PSN account to play online, and since Sony hasn't registered to do business in those territories, players there simply can't buy the game at all.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Helldivers 2 went through the exact same controversy in 2024, when Sony's retroactive PSN requirement triggered a wave of review-bombing that dropped the game to Overwhelmingly Negative on Steam and blocked purchases in over 170 countries. The backlash was severe enough that Sony reversed course and dropped the PSN mandate for that game. You'd think that experience would have changed the playbook. It clearly hasn't.

The crossplay excuse

The most likely justification is crossplay. Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls launches August 6 as a PS5 and PC exclusive with cross-platform play between both versions, which presumably requires a PSN account on the PC side to function. But this logic falls apart under even light scrutiny. If crossplay is the issue, let players in restricted countries simply play without it. The game has a single-player campaign, offline modes, and local multiplayer. Locking 132 countries out of the entire purchase because they can't access one online feature is absurd.

Sony's own track record proves there are alternatives. After the Helldivers 2 backlash, PlayStation removed PSN requirements from several single-player titles. Shift Up, the developer behind Stellar Blade, reportedly used its leverage as IP owner to get Sony to ease restrictions on that game's PC release. But Marvel Tokon is a different situation: Sony owns the franchise. Arc System Works is the developer, but PlayStation Studios and PlayStation Publishing are on the box. There's no third-party studio with enough clout to push back.

I keep coming back to the scale of this. We're talking about 132 countries where people with perfectly functional Steam accounts and perfectly functional internet connections cannot give Sony their money. PlayStation CEO Hideaki Nishino has specifically cited Marvel Tokon as part of Sony's live-service strategy. If you're banking on a game to drive your service model, blocking it in most of the world's nations before it even launches is a baffling way to do it. This is especially grim given reporting that Sony is pulling back from releasing single-player games on PC entirely, planning to focus its PC output on live-service titles going forward. If live-service is the only PC pipeline Sony intends to maintain, and every live-service game carries a PSN requirement that locks out 132 countries, then Sony's PC strategy has a hole in it large enough to fly a helicarrier through.

The frustrating part is that Marvel Tokon itself looks excellent. Hands-on previews describe a fighter that nails the balance between accessibility and depth, with Arc System Works' signature visual style applied to the Marvel roster. It's the kind of game that could pull in players well beyond the traditional fighting game community. Instead, the conversation heading into launch is about regional lockouts and PSN infrastructure that hasn't kept pace with Sony's own ambitions.

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is set to release on August 6 for PS5 and PC. Whether Sony addresses the 132-country block before then will say a lot about how seriously it takes the lesson Helldivers 2 already taught it.