The open beta for Sony and Arc System Works’ Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls dropped on PlayStation 5 and PC yesterday, and players on PS5 generally seem to be having fun with the new Marvel vs. Capcom-esque fighter–well, at least they seemed to be once PlayStation Network stopped shitting the bed.
However, Marvel Tōkon players on Steam–or, rather, the ones that are actually allowed to play it–can’t quite say the same, though, as the PC version of the game is oddly CPU-hungry.
There are, no exaggeration, hundreds of posts across X and Reddit complaining about performance issues in Marvel Tōkon’s open beta on PC, and many of said reports are taking aim at the “5 Sony sub services” that launch when you boot up the game.
PC READY!!! https://t.co/PSe6eAf2Na pic.twitter.com/ddxB8HvgGm
— Zeph (@KyleHydeFan) July 24, 2026
Considering this is an open beta we’re talking about, that might not sound like such a big deal, but it’s important to note here that the game releases in less than two weeks on August 6.
I decided to run a few tests on my end (for context, my PC has a Ryzen 7 7700X CPU, RTX 4080 graphics card, and 64GB of RAM), and, while I’m no Digital Foundry, I can confirm that, even on medium graphics settings, Marvel Tōkon was struggling to run on my relatively decent hardware.
For instance, the game often hogged upwards of 95 percent of my CPU and occasionally as much as 5,000MB of my PC’s physical memory. Six separate versions of the PlayStation PC SDK Runtime application also booted when starting the game, although these had very minimal impact on my CPU and memory.
WHY IS MY COMPUTER TURNING INTO A YOUTUBE POOP https://t.co/7Fcfsh0RkR pic.twitter.com/EONz0kxg1l
— Home Depotemkin (@HomeDepotemkin) July 25, 2026
I did notice that letting Marvel Tōkon run for roughly 30 minutes seemed to alleviate most of these issues, though, as the processor utilization dipped to around 60 percent. As many have already theorized, this might be due to the shaders compiling on bootup. But if it is indeed a shader compilation-related issue, it’s weird that Marvel Tōkon runs into this issue every time I boot it up, and not just the first time.
However, even after letting the game cook my CPU for half an hour, online matches were still an absolute mess. For whatever reason, presumably the anti-cheat, online matches made my CPU usage jump back up to 90 percent. At first I thought that this was a connection-related issue or maybe even a crossplay foible, but nope–Marvel Tōkon’s online matches were directly hammering my CPU.
I can only hope that this is perhaps, as those more tech-savvy than I seem to believe, some kind of temporary anti-datamining measure on PC, because otherwise I don’t know how the dev team is going to have enough to fix these issues before release.
🖥️ PC Troubleshooting (1/6)
Tōkon Warriors,
We’re continuing to investigate the gameplay and performance issues currently being reported on PC.While our investigation continues, we’d like to share several community-suggested troubleshooting steps that may help improve…
— MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls (@MARVELTokon) July 25, 2026
On the plus side, the devs have released an official statement on X addressing PC players’ performance woes: “Tōkon Warriors, We’re aware of the gameplay and performance issues currently affecting the PC version of MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls. Our team is actively investigating these issues and working on a fix. We’ll share an update as soon as we have more information.”
For the time being, though, if you’re excited about picking up Marvel Tōkon on PC at the start of August, I’d suggest waiting for the Steam reviews to drop instead of buying it on day one.