Sony’s PSN & CPU Issues Ruining the MARVEL Tōkon Beta

If you've been keeping tabs on PlayStation lately, you already know 2026 hasn't been kind to the brand's reputation, and this week gives you another reason why. MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls just kicked off its open beta, and instead of a clean launch, you got a mess that touches both console and PC players.

MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls went into open beta on Friday, July 24, and right around that same window, PSN went down for several hours. Whether you blame AWS or just chalk it up to bad luck, the outcome is the same. If you're paying for PlayStation Plus, you're still dealing with outages during one of the platform's bigger beta moments of the summer.

If you're on PC, this is where it starts to get frustrating.

MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls also launched its open beta on PC, but the game still requires a PlayStation Network account to play. That means if you're in a region where PSN isn't supported, you're locked out entirely. And even if PSN is available where you live, you're still being asked to link yet another account just to try out a fighting game, which is exactly the kind of friction a lot of players have grown tired of.

You've likely seen the same pushback with Ubisoft titles in the past, and the reaction here isn't much different. Adding an extra login layer for a service that's earned a lot of frustration lately isn't doing MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls any favors.

Beyond the account requirement, you're also looking at some real performance concerns on PC. Multiple players online have pointed out that MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls appears to lean hard on a single CPU thread, which some are tying to the anti-cheat system and its PlayStation 5-based architecture.

On top of that, you'll find several Sony-related background services running the moment you launch the game. If you open your task manager while playing, you'll likely spot a handful of these processes active at once, and that's contributing to slowdown that has nothing to do with your GPU.

Another player weighed in on input latency.

They noted that the PS5 version of the beta currently lacks 120Hz and VRR support, which limits how responsive it can feel. Meanwhile, the PC version was described as noticeably smoother, even when capped at 60Hz. So if you're debating which platform to try MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls on, PC currently seems to have the edge, at least on higher-end setups.

That said, you'll find plenty of mixed feedback if you check the Steam Community page. It's not just a handful of complaints either; there's a steady stream of players reporting issues with the open beta. Of course, PC performance discussions are always a bit messy because everyone comes in with different expectations.

Some players are fine running games at 30 frames per second and won't notice much of a problem. Others will immediately flag anything below 60 as unacceptable. You'll even run into people with top-tier GPUs like an RTX 5080 or 5090 who never touch their graphics settings and genuinely can't tell the difference in performance; they just wanted the hardware as a flex.

Because of that gap in expectations, judging PC performance for something like MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls isn't as straightforward as it might seem, since you're getting wildly different reports depending on who's posting.

Even with all that, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls looks like a genuinely solid fighting game underneath the technical issues.

Arc System Works clearly put real effort into it. The problem is everything wrapped around it, from PSN account requirements to background processes eating into performance, that's dragging the experience down. This whole situation is really just one more example of where PlayStation stands right now.

As a publisher, comparing them directly to individual studios doesn't quite work, but among publishers, they're in rough shape. You'll still see them making plenty of money, though, mostly thanks to casual buyers. Look at the top preordered titles on the PlayStation Store right now, and you'll find FIFA, NBA, Grand Theft Auto, and Call of Duty sitting at the top.

That audience isn't watching gaming content or following beta feedback; they're just buying the expensive editions of yearly releases without a second thought. For more dedicated players, though, you're kind of stuck without a strong alternative.

PC gaming remains the better overall option in most cases, but the cost of entry is still a real barrier for a lot of people, and it's not realistic to expect everyone to build or buy a gaming PC. And PC isn't without its own headaches either. Crashes, troubleshooting, and rough ports are still part of the experience if you play on PC often enough.

Consoles, by comparison, tend to be more consistent day to day. At the end of it all, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls is shaping up to be a good game held back by PlayStation's baggage. Between the PSN account requirement and the technical hiccups on both platforms, it's a rocky start for a beta that otherwise had a lot going for it.