Run Epic's Launcher to Fix Marvel Tokon on Steam?

"Such a fun game. Of course, Sony has to ruin everything. The PC port plays miserable. The settings don't even display correctly," one of the most popular Steam reviews for Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls said. That review currently has a thumbs down, and it's far from alone.

Marvel Tokon's Steam player rating currently sits at Mixed with roughly 40% positive reviews. The PC port launched on August 6 with stuttering, frame drops, and performance problems severe enough that the game's peak concurrent player count has nearly halved from around 25,000 to roughly 14,000 in just a few days. Fighting game streamer Maximilian Dood uninstalled the PC version mid-stream and switched to PS5. The online tournament series Tampa Never Sleeps banned PC players from competing entirely. I wrote earlier this week about the player count freefall and the review situation, but what's happening now has crossed from frustrating into absurd.

Players are circulating workarounds on Discord and social media that read like superstition more than troubleshooting. The wildest suggestion, reposted by the X account WheelsFGC from a Discord chat, tells players to run the Epic Games Store launcher in the background while playing on Steam. The logic, if you can call it that, is that Marvel Tokon runs on Unreal Engine 5 and communicates with Epic's backend services, so having EGS open supposedly smooths out those integrations. Some players in the replies claimed it worked. Others said it did nothing. Nobody has offered any technical evidence either way. I've seen a lot of community-sourced PC fixes over the years, and this one sits right on the line between creative desperation and pure placebo.

59.9 FPS and Other Rituals

Another workaround surfaced by fighting game streamer Chris F involves using Riva Tuner Statistics Server to cap the framerate at exactly 59.9 FPS to eliminate microstuttering. Not 60. Not 59. Specifically 59.9. Beyond that, players are cycling through the in-game "Set Graphics Automatically" button, manually reloading shaders, and trying every combination of settings they can think of. As Polygon reported, even if you somehow get the game running smoothly on your end, it might not matter: fighting game rollback netcode means your opponent's performance issues can cause stuttering on your screen, not theirs. It's a problem the fighting game community calls "one-sided rollback," and it means a flawless PC setup can still deliver a miserable online experience.

"45fps for a fighting game is embarrassing," one Steam reviewer said. "If I can run Tekken and Street Fighter, I should be able to run this." Another said the game "doesn't work on Steam Deck and Linux because Sony is trying to pull some dumb shenanigans." A third said there is "no good technical excuse for shutting out Linux here," pointing out that Easy Anti-Cheat already supports Proton when developers enable it. The PSN account requirement, which blocks the game in over 100 countries, continues to draw anger on top of the technical problems.

What makes all of this so frustrating is that nearly everyone agrees the actual game is good. Arc System Works built something people want to play. "First and foremost, Arcsys made an INCREDIBLE game," one reviewer said, before spending the rest of the review explaining why Sony's decisions made it impossible to recommend. The studio posted a statement on social media acknowledging that "some PC players are experiencing performance issues" and saying the team is "actively investigating," but offered no timeline and no specifics.

When your community is telling each other to open a completely unrelated game launcher as a Hail Mary fix, you don't have a minor bug. You have a port that wasn't ready to ship. Arc System Works and Sony charged $70 for this, and PC players got a product that requires folk remedies to function. Every day without a concrete patch timeline is a day more players leave for PS5 or leave entirely, and that 14,000 peak concurrent number is only going in one direction.