Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls has managed to sell a total of 485,000 copies across PS5 and Steam in the week since it launched, but Alinea's head of market analysis Rhys Elliott guesses the 4v4 tag team fighter could have done much better than that if Steam reviewers didn't hate its PC port so much.
The game itself is great. Guilty Gear Strive developer Arc System Works predictably infused Marvel Tokon with its characteristic, ostentatious combat style and vibrant art, leading writer Alan Wen to say in GamesRadar+'s four-and-a-half-star Marvel Tokon review that the game makes you "so convinced that it's 2D animation of the highest caliber until you launch an opponent or execute a screen-filling super skill." Notably, Wen played the game on PS5. Many of Marvel Tokon's Steam reviews, instead, fixate on the fact that the game requires a PSN account to play on PC, and then it crashes, and they bemoan missing Linux support, which makes Marvel Tokon incompatible with the Steam Deck.
Marvel Tokon's overall Mixed Steam rating is complicated in this sense – many of its 2,658 total negative reviews have no problem with Arc System Works's actual game. But they see Marvel Tokon as a representation of everything currently wrong with PlayStation, which is now experiencing the beginning of the three million years of bad karma it's earned for its decision to stop producing physical game discs.
A popular negative Marvel Tokon review with over 1,000 "helpful" ratings on Steam explains it this way: "As much as I adore this game, i will call out the blatant bullsh*t Sony pulled to make TOKON on PC the way that it is... My review will remain negative until the game is optimized enough for all users that can run the minimum reqs, as well as Linux support at some point…"
So, yeah, according to Alinea, Marvel Tokon moved 485,000 copies and made $33 million. It should be a full-fat comeback story for Marvel fighting games, a niche previously made boring by the underwhelming Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite in 2017, but Elliott emphasizes that 485,000 copies sold is a minimum.
He recognizes Marvel Tokon's Steam launch "was marred by performance issues, bugs, intrusive DRM, and no Linux support." And "the Steam review score is pretty telling," Elliott continues, "at under 50% positive as I write this. It's just 19% positive among those who played under an hour, suggesting a wave of bounce-and-refund players."
"Arc has been patching hard, and many issues are already fixed, but first impressions are sticky," he concludes. "Tokon might have sold closer to 1M if the Steam stuff hadn't been such an issue. Word of mouth was cut short." Huh, it sounds like prioritizing people over the mirage of fast, infinite growth is important. Who knew.
