Marvel Tōkon open beta hits PC with stutters and poor optimisation, Arc System Works apologises

Arc System Works has apologised to PC players after Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls' open beta launched with widespread performance problems. The three-day beta window was already complicated by a PlayStation Network outage that knocked services offline for nearly the entire first day in some regions — and PC players then ran into a separate wall of stuttering and shoddy optimisation regardless of hardware specs.

The studio confirmed it is "actively investigating these issues and working on a fix" and followed up with a six-point troubleshooting thread suggesting workarounds: running the Shader Warm-Up tool, switching from Borderless Fullscreen to Fullscreen, disabling Frame Generation in the NVIDIA App, and turning off screen-recording overlays. Community theories point to the game hammering a single CPU thread, partly blamed on multiple anti-cheat and Sony background services visible in Task Manager — reportedly five PlayStation sub-services running simultaneously. Players also flagged near-nonexistent input buffering, with motion inputs frequently misread during combos. On top of that, the PSN sign-in requirement — which blocks players in 132 countries entirely — drew complaints for forcing a login prompt every time the game is closed.

Arc System Works is the studio behind the Guilty Gear and BlazBlue series, so expectations for a polished fighting game experience run high. Marvel Tōkon is a tag-team fighter published by Sony, and its PC presence matters: despite the chaos, the beta peaked at 33,233 concurrent players on Steam, clearing Street Fighter 6's 2023 beta record of 32,787 and comfortably doubling Tekken 8's beta peak of 15,035. That's a strong signal of PC interest — which makes the port's state all the more frustrating for the community.

The full game launches on August 6, leaving Arc System Works just over a week to address the issues. At least one Reddit user flatly said they won't buy until performance is fixed, adding they have "no idea how you can get this cleaned up in two weeks." Whether the studio can ship a meaningfully improved PC build in that window remains the open question heading into launch.