Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls Lost 90% Of Its Players And It Makes Sense

One of the biggest fighting game debuts of the year goes to "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls," which launched in early August. Ahead of its launch, the title was one of the most anticipated video games of 2026 and not just because of its extensive use of the Marvel license. The game is developed by Arc System Works, the studio behind such acclaimed genre hits as "Guilty Gear Strive" and "Dragon Ball FighterZ." By all accounts, "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls" had all the hallmarks of becoming this year's breakout fighting game smash.

But despite earning widespread critical acclaim, including a 94% critics' recommendation score on OpenCritic, "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls" has struggled to retain an active playerbase. The PC player population has seen a significant drop since the game made its big debut weeks ago. While a post-launch decline is expected and live-service games are always an a precarious position, including the way "Destiny 2" lost its playerbase, the drop-off this quickly for "Marvel Tōkon" is eyebrow-raising. But there are clear reasons why gamers have quietly been moving on from "Marvel Tōkon" in the weeks since its arrival.

Here's why "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls" lost 90% of its players and why that big drop makes sense.

The issues with "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls" retaining its PC playerbase can be traced back to how publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment handled the PC rollout of "Helldivers II" in 2024. Just like "Helldivers II" for its first year and a half, "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls" is exclusive to PlayStation 5 and PC, with no other platforms currently announced. The problem is, for the PC version, players still had to link their account to an active PlayStation Network profile in order to actually play the game. Despite the understandable backlash, Sony repeated its controversial PSN requirement for "God of War Ragnarök" when that game was ported to the PC in 2024.

Two years after this and Sony has continued this policy for the PC version of "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls" to similar frustrating results and angry gamer response. It's important to note that creating a PSN account is free and doesn't require owning a PlayStation, or even providing payment details. What comes at a cost is subscribing for PlayStation Plus, Sony's longstanding online service interfaced with their platforms. But requiring PC users to have a PSN account just to play this version of the game feels like an awkward and tedious extra step.

A different factor impacting the PC version of "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls" is the prominent usage of digital rights management (DRM) software to prevent piracy on the platform. The inclusion of this software running alongside the game reportedly affects its technical performance, with players noticing its negative impact. Reported issues include inconsistent frame rate, the game crashing, unstable online connections during matches, and graphical bugs. With these symptoms, it stands to reason that the PlayStation 5 is far and away the best way to play the game, leaving those without a PS5 in the lurch.

"Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls" is far from the only recent game to see intrusive DRM usage visibly affect game performance on PCs. Earlier this year, "007 First Light" also utilized DRM for its PC version when the game launched this past May. This decision was met with some vocal disappointment by gamers and, after two months on the market, IO Interactive quietly removed these anti-tampering and anti-piracy measures from the title. Given the complaints surrounding "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls," Sony may make a similar decision in removing its DRM software, though they're just as likely to ignore the backlash.

When "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls" launched on August 6, its PC playerbase peaked at over 24,000 concurrent active users. Since then, the game's concurrent user count on PC averages around 4,000-5,000 players, a drop of approximately 80%. This, coupled with the natural reduction in players on PlayStation 5 during launch, further increases the size of the drop in the game's active player count since its peak. If Sony wants the game to have a viable presence on the PC, it'll need to take major steps to reverse the negative impression it has left with players on the platform.

This isn't to say that the "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls" isn't a great game, especially when run on a PS5. The game is one of the best tag-driven fighting games in years and uses its Marvel license to grant itself a robust roster out the gate. The game is incredibly feature-rich at launch and has a wave of planned DLC coming, including new playable fighters. But the issue lies in how much more unreliably the PC version runs, especially in comparison to its PS5 counterpart.

While it's not one of the best Marvel video games of all time, "Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls" deserves more positive buzz — if its PC version starts working as intended.