No, Marvel Tōkon's PC open beta is not a safe day-one buy right now. The PlayStation 5 version appears mostly playable, but the Steam version is showing severe CPU and memory spikes, odd startup processes, and online matches that can push a strong gaming PC into the red.
Is Marvel Tōkon on PC stable? Not yet. The PC open beta is still rough, with reports of CPU usage climbing past 95 percent, physical memory spikes around 5,000MB, and several PlayStation PC SDK Runtime processes launching at startup.
The open beta launched July 24 on PlayStation 5 and PC. PlayStation 5 players seemed to have a smoother experience once PlayStation Network stopped throwing its own launch-day tantrum, but the PC version quickly became the story because the full game releases August 6.
What is happening on Steam?
Arc System Works and Sony's Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is an ambitious new fighter, and the concept is easy to get excited about. Arc System Works has a strong fighting-game pedigree, while Sony has been moving more console-first releases to Steam, so the PC version was going to be judged hard from the start.
The problem is that the PC beta feels less like a polished port and more like a console build trying to survive under Steam's skin. Players are reporting huge CPU usage, memory spikes, and a launcher environment that feels unnecessarily bloated for what should be a quick arcade-style launch.
The loudest complaints are already showing up on X, including reports that the game can turn a decent setup into a CPU sauna during normal operation.
The startup process is part of the problem
The startup behavior is the part that feels most suspicious. Players have noticed five “Sony sub services” launching on boot, plus six separate copies of the PlayStation PC SDK Runtime application.
Those runtime copies do not seem to be the main resource hog, but they are exactly the kind of background clutter that makes a PC build feel less like a game and more like a console storefront wearing a PC hat. The issue is not just “the game runs.” It is whether the game respects the machine it is asking to run on.
A hands-on check on a Ryzen 7 7700X, RTX 4080, and 64GB of RAM made the problem easy to see. Even on medium graphics settings, the game was often hovering above 95 percent CPU usage, while physical memory occasionally climbed to about 5,000MB.
Why the PC version feels worse than a normal beta
This is still an open beta, which helps explain some instability, but the timing makes it worse. The game launches on August 6, so the beta is not some distant test run. It is the public demo version of the product players will soon be buying.
Fighting games are also uniquely unforgiving. A shooter can sometimes hide behind netcode excuses and server load, but a fighting game lives or dies on clean input response, stable frame pacing, and predictable online matches. When the CPU is already screaming, even a small matchmaking or anti-cheat spike can turn a clean 1v1 into a panic room with punch effects.
The most annoying detail is that the game seemed to improve after running for roughly 30 minutes. CPU usage dropped closer
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