[#item_full_content] [[{“value”:”Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls launched a week ago for $50 on PS5 and PC. Marvel Tokon is a 4v4 tag-team fighter from PlayStation Studios, Arc System Works, and Marvel Games. This is a pretty niche genre in a bloody huge IP. So far, Marvel Tokon has sold through 485K copies across PS5 (74% of that split) and Steam (26%). It’s made $33M in revenue across those platforms.
Despite not being a fighting-game guy, I gave this one a shot over a mate’s house. I found it awesome – easy to learn, hard to master (or so I hear), with a proper story mode and lush visuals. It treats the IP pretty well, too.
The lower Steam share tracks, with many fighting games skewing to console due to easier-to-access couch multiplayer. Marvel Tokon’s Steam launch, though, was marred by performance issues, bugs, intrusive DRM, and no Linux support (so no proper Steam Deck compatibility).
The Steam review score is pretty telling, 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.
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Arc has been patching hard, and many issues are already fixed, but first impressions are sticky. Tokon might have sold closer to 1M if the Steam stuff hadn’t been such an issue. Word of mouth was cut short.
Who’s playing Marvel Tokon?
Our estimates show that roughly 75% of Marvel Tokon players live in North America, with the majority, of course, in the US. This helps explain why the PS5 physical share at 15.1% – lower than usual for a new PlayStation game. US players skew more digital than most regions, and this is a heavily American audience. Captain America, indeed.
You can see some of our overview data in the Alinea platform screenshot below:
The PS5 audience overlap (the shared unique players between Tokon and other games) shows the hardcore fighting-game core tapped in. The entire top 10 by crossover is fighting games, with Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves (8% crossover), Invincible VS (8%), and DNF Duel (7%) leading the way.
Directional overlap with the mainstream is strong on PS5, as well:
52% of PS5 Tokon players have played Dragon Ball FighterZ (another Arc-made, IP-driven fighter),
49% Street Fighter 5
41% Mortal Kombat 1
39% Street Fighter 6
35% Tekken 7
And 25% apiece for Guilty Gear Strive (also Arc) and Riot’s 2XKO.
Marvel fandom too, of course
Marvel fandom is helping push copies on this one. On PS5, 60% of Tokon’s PS5 players have played Spider-Man: Miles Morales, 57% Spider-Man 2, and 53% Marvel Rivals.
Those numbers are higher than even the biggest fighting-game overlap (Dragon Ball FighterZ at 52%). As we covered earlier this week, Spider-Man in particular is very front of mind right now, thanks to the new movie. And Spidey is featured prominently on the artwork and trailers.
Relatively speaking, fighting games are a pretty niche genre (Smash, Dragon Ball Z, and flagship franchises like Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat aside…). Even Riot couldn’t crack it, laying off around 80 people, roughly half the 2XKO team, in February due to soft player momentum. Despite being free-to-play, 2XKO has pulled in just 1M players on PS5.
Meanwhile, Tokon is a paid, single-genre fighter that has done 485K in a week. One difference there (in addition to Riot fandom being mostly all PC) is the IP. Marvel is doing some lifting a niche genre can’t do on its own. That’s the bet PlayStation, Arc, and Marvel made, and – Steam wobbles aside – so far, so decent.
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And I have a feeling this game will shift a few more copies for kiddos as we close in on the holiday season. Also, 43% of Marvel Tokon’s PS5 players played the open beta (55% on Steam), even through the PSN outages. Fans turned up to try it, and a healthy chunk converted into buyers. Yes, our platform now tracks demo and beta data across PlayStation, Steam, and Xbox!
Speaking of betas…
1.2M Xbox players emerged for Gears of War: E-Day’s first beta, and engagement was chunky
Gears of War: E-Day ran its first beta from 6 to 10 August, open to Game Pass Ultimate members, PC Game Pass members, and anyone who pre-ordered. On Xbox (console and PC), 1.2M players gave it a go, with almost 700K sinking their lancers in on Friday.
The audience is who you’d expect, the existing Gears faithful:
Nearly 90% of beta players have previously played Gears 5.
55% did their homework for the prequel with last year’s Gears of War: Reloaded.
24.1% played 10+ hours, 12.7% 15+ hours, and 6.5% clocked 20+ hours.
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This was a four-ish day beta, so the 6.5% putting in 20+ hours were playing four to five hours every single day of it (on average, more on the weekend, obviously). Some of this was driven by beta rewards that carry over to the full game (mainly an ‘’Epic’’ character skin at level 20, and ‘’Rare’’ weapon set for stuff in the PvE Horde Siege mode).
I jumped in myself and had an absolute blast. The new PvE mode is rad, the faster movement feels great (jumping in Gears feels wild), and the PvP is as bloody brilliant (and bloody and brilliant) as ever.
My one gripe, as always, for PvP Gears is the roll-wall bounce-Gnasher meta. I’ve never loved the series drifting shotgun-first, and I’d dearly love a no-shotgun mode – or at least one where we don’t spawn in with an OP shotgun. I digress.
On Steam, pre-order copies roughly doubled off the back of the beta, from around 50K before it to 100K after. Fence-sitters and later-buyers bit the bullet to get in, probably nudged by the strong word of mouth.
Obviously, 100K Steam pre-orders with a month and a half still to go is a healthy leading indicator for launch. Missing PS5 might come back to bite Xbox on this one, though. It’s on Steam anyway, after all.
Anyway, the Gears E-Day open beta kicks off today and runs until 17 August, so we’ll have more beta numbers next week. Hit subscribe below to get them in your inbox for free:
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Cool links and other stuff
Our friends at IGN, Eurogamer, and Giant Bomb covered our Halo-focused newsletter from earlier this week.
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The last word
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[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]”}]] 
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