PC players swear opening the Epic Games Store fixes Marvel Tōkon. It shouldn't do anything.
Marvel Tōkon’s broken PC port has players trying a bizarre fix: launch the Epic Games Store first, then boot the game. Some swear it smooths performance. Others say it does nothing. There’s no technical reason it should work at all.
Here’s the state of Marvel Tōkon on PC: the game runs so badly that players are opening a completely unrelated storefront, leaving it idling in the background, and booting the game on faith, because someone on Reddit said it helped.
Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, Arc System Works’ Marvel tag fighter published by Sony, launched to an abysmal 44% rating on Steam. Its PC port carried performance problems over from the beta and never got them fixed. So players did what players do when a game is broken and the developer is still “actively investigating”: they started trading folk remedies.
The one making the rounds is the strangest yet.
The “fix” that makes no sense
The remedy is simple to describe and impossible to justify.
Open the Epic Games Store. Leave it running. Then launch Marvel Tōkon. Do that, some players say, and performance improves. There is no reason this should work. Marvel Tōkon isn’t an Epic exclusive, the storefront isn’t a driver or a dependency, and nothing about a second launcher sitting idle should touch a game’s frame rate.
And yet Reddit and X are full of people insisting it does. “This s**t actually works,” one player posted, crying-laughing. Right beside them are the players reporting it changed nothing at all, and gently suggesting the believers are experiencing a placebo, willing an improvement into existence because they badly want the game to run.
Even the tester couldn’t be sure
The person best positioned to settle it landed in the most honest place available: shrugging.
Kotaku’s own writer tried the trick and reported it seemed to help a little. Some minor FPS gains, oddly lower CPU load. But he couldn’t rule out that relaunching the game a dozen times to test it was the real cause of any improvement, rather than the Epic Store idling in the background. That’s the whole trap with placebo fixes. Once you’ve decided a ritual works, every good result confirms it and every bad one gets blamed on something else.
Why players are stuck doing this at all
The superstition isn’t the sad part. The reason for it is.
When a big-budget fighting game ships in a state where its own community is swapping unverifiable launch rituals like it’s a haunted piece of software, the port didn’t get finished.
A patch has since started improving the Steam version, “maybe PS5 players will play with us now,” one hopeful player wrote, so there’s a real fix arriving where the folk remedy couldn’t.
But the fact that “have you tried opening a different store first” became genuine, upvoted advice tells you exactly how rough the launch was. The Epic Games Store isn’t fixing Marvel Tōkon. Hope is. And hope is a bad graphics setting.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Kotaku (Lewis Parker) (August 9, 2026), verified for the open-the-Epic-Games-Store workaround, the mixed player reports across Reddit and X, the “this shit actually works” and placebo-skeptic reactions, the writer’s own inconclusive test, and the 44% Steam rating and unfixed-since-beta performance context
Kotaku (Kenneth Shepard) (August 7-10, 2026), verified for Arc System Works “actively investigating” the PC performance issues, the abysmal launch rating, and the subsequent patch improving the Steam version with the “maybe PS5 players will play with us now” reaction