These figures come from Rhys Elliott, the head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics. He posted Alinea’s findings on social media, claiming that around 485,000 copies have been sold between PlayStation 5 and PC.
In terms of the split between platforms, Elliott says that PS5 players make up 74 percent of those sales, with Steam making up the remaining 26 percent. He notes the typical popularity of fighting games on console over PC, as well as performance problems that marred the PC version of the game at launch. Elliot speculates that these issues may have cut the game’s word-of-mouth short, and that it could have sold closer to one million copies if not for these problems.
As for regional splits, North Americans reportedly make up 75 percent of the Marvel Tōkon playerbase. There are some really interesting overlaps with Tōkon players and other games too. According to Elliott , 52 percent of PS5 Marvel Tōkon players have played Dragon Ball FighterZ, 49 percent have played Street Fighter 5, and 41 percent have tried Mortal Kombat 1. So fighting game fans have turned up in force here, it seems.
Marvel fans have too though. 60 percent of Tōkon players on PS5 have played Spider-Man: Miles Morales, 57 percent have played Spider-Man 2, and 53 percent have hopped over from Marvel Rivals. The Marvel franchise is clearly doing some great work here in terms of early popularity.
How does this compare with other games? Well, Arc System Works’ hugely successful tag game Dragon Ball FighterZ was estimated to have sold at a similar pace back in 2018, so that’s a great sign for Marvel Tōkon. In terms of lifetime sales, that game went on to sell over 10m copies by 2023, making it a staggering success.
Discussions around Marvel Tōkon’s initial success allow for interesting comparisons with other fighters. In Elliott’s post on Marvel Tōkon, he also claims that the free-to-play fighting game 2XKO only managed to pass one million lifetime players since releasing back in January.
Meanwhile, someone asked Ed Boon how many copies Injustice 2 has sold since its release back in 2017, to which he confirmed over 9m copies have been sold worldwide for that superhero brawler.
So the stage is set for Marvel Tōkon to hopefully keep the momentum going throughout 2026 and beyond. With a recent patch seemingly fixing a good number of those aforementioned performance problems, maybe some of that word of mouth will pick back up.
