Marvel Tokon Tanks to 44% on Steam Despite Rave Gameplay

"First and foremost, Arcsys made an INCREDIBLE game," one of the most popular reviews on Marvel Tokon's Steam page reads. The reviewer then spends the rest of the post explaining why they can't recommend it. That contradiction sits at the centre of one of the strangest launches of 2026: a fighting game that players love playing and hate owning.

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, the anime-styled Marvel fighter developed by Arc System Works and published by Sony, launched on PC and PS5 on August 6. As of yesterday, just 44% of the game's 2,561 Steam reviews are positive. A "Mixed" rating for a game with this pedigree, from the studio behind Guilty Gear Strive and Dragon Ball FighterZ, is brutal. But almost nobody is blaming the actual fighting game.

The complaints break down into three buckets: a PC port with serious performance problems, mandatory PlayStation Network account linking, and a complete lack of Linux support that locks out Steam Deck users entirely.

A Port That Can't Keep Up

For a fighting game, framerate isn't a nice-to-have. It's the foundation everything else sits on. Rollback netcode, the industry-standard solution for smooth online play, falls apart when one player's machine can't hold a steady 60fps. And too many PC players are reporting exactly that. "45fps for a fighting game is embarrassing," one reviewer said. "If I can run Tekken and Street Fighter, I should be able to run this."

Another popular review from Steam user Gourmet said the experience was outright broken: "The settings don't even display correctly. Either the netcode or the poor performance makes the online play very bad, with rollback spikes." I covered the performance situation earlier this week, and the picture hasn't improved much since. When your fighting game can't maintain a locked framerate on hardware that runs Tekken 8 and Street Fighter 6 without issue, you have a port problem, not a specs problem.

Some PS5 players have responded by disabling crossplay entirely, since matching against a PC opponent who's dropping frames causes rollback spikes on both ends. A fighting game where one platform's players are actively avoiding the other is not a healthy launch.

The PSN requirement is the other flashpoint, and it's one Sony has been through before. Steam users flagged weeks before launch that Marvel Tokon would be blocked in over 100 countries because PlayStation Network isn't officially supported in those regions. One reviewer said they couldn't play with friends who live in affected countries, despite the game itself running fine. Another said simply: "Get this Sony PlayStation account bs OUTTA here bro. Always online in 2026 is insane."

This is the same issue that nearly derailed Helldivers 2 in 2024, when Sony tried to enforce mandatory PSN linking on PC and eventually reversed course after massive backlash. The difference here is that Sony hasn't budged. I find it baffling that a publisher can watch one of its biggest games nearly implode over a policy, reverse that policy, and then quietly re-impose it on the next title like nothing happened.

Linux Locked Out

Then there's the Linux situation. Easy Anti-Cheat, the anti-cheat solution Tokon uses, does support Proton when developers enable it. Marvel Rivals, another online Marvel game, runs on Linux. Arc System Works didn't flip that switch. One highly-rated review said it plainly: "There is no good technical excuse for shutting out Linux here. Tokon treats Linux players as disposable before they even reach the character select screen." Every Steam Deck owner who bought this game on launch day got a black screen for their money.

Arc System Works has at least acknowledged the situation. In a statement posted to the game's official account on X, the studio said:

Thank you for an amazing launch day! Seeing you all jump into the fight has been unreal. We're aware that some PC players are experiencing performance issues. The team is actively investigating these reports. Please keep your feedback coming in, it helps.

That's a start, but "actively investigating" without a timeline or specifics is the kind of response that buys goodwill for about 48 hours. After that, players want patch notes.

What makes this whole situation so frustrating is that the game underneath all of this is clearly special. Arc System Works packed Deadpool's moveset with references spanning nearly 30 years of fighting game history, from Street Fighter 2 win screens to Skullomania's Skullo Dream super from Street Fighter EX2 Plus. The roster, the art direction, the mechanical depth: players are praising all of it. The 56% of negative reviews aren't from people who dislike Marvel Tokon. They're from people who can't play it properly, or who refuse to accept the strings Sony attached to it.

I've seen plenty of games launch broken and deserve every negative review they get. This isn't that. This is a game that earned its hype and then had its PC launch sabotaged by a bad port and platform politics. If Arc System Works patches the performance issues quickly and Sony does what it did with Helldivers 2, that 44% could recover fast. If they don't, Marvel Tokon becomes another cautionary tale about what happens when the best fighting game on the market ships inside the worst wrapper. The PS5 version runs fine, which only makes the PC situation harder to defend.