Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls has reportedly sold more copies on PlayStation 5 than PC, but bad word-of-mouth around the Steam version has followed the game since its beta. Though developer Arc System Works has put out updates that PC players say have improved the version’s struggling performance, for a lot of players, the damage was already done and they’ve moved on to other things. Arc System Works isn’t giving up on the game, but the team also acknowledges it has to gain back player trust moving forward.
In an interview with VGC, Tōkon producer Takeshi Yamanaka talked about the fighter’s early reception, and while Arc System Works says it’s seen a lot of engagement in these early weeks since the game’s launch on August 6, he noted that rebuilding the bridge between the game and the PC community is going to be an ongoing process.
“I do think that it’s an extremely challenging task that we need to undertake, where we sincerely want to put all of our effort forward to create an environment where the players can experience this game that we’ve worked so hard to create, and that we do have a lot of confidence that the game itself will be really fun for them,” he said.
Yamanaka goes on to apologize to PC players who ran into performance troubles and were unable to play Tōkon at launch, and says that the team is facing the issue “head-on” to improve the experience.
“I feel that that is the most that we can do,” he said. “So the team will continue to work together as one to try to provide a game that the players can enjoy even more than the initial version of the game. And all we can do is do our best and pray that that sentiment will reach the player base.”
Much of Tōkon’s PC performance issues seemed to stem from it being oddly demanding and eating up a lot of system memory just to run. Some fans reported that pirated versions of the game actually ran better because they lack some of the backend systems you’ll find in official versions of the game. Hopefully Arc System Works sorts it all out, because otherwise it’s going to be an even bleaker year for fighting games.
