Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls developer Arc System Works has admitted that regaining player trust after the game's disappointing PC launch will be “extremely challenging,” and offered “sincere apologies” to the players affected.
Speaking to Video Games Chronicle as part of a forthcoming interview, producer Takeshi Yamanaka said the team has been happy with the console reception two weeks on from release, with the core fighting game audience “playing matches every day, they're in training mode, they're coming up with new combos.” The PC version is a different story.
However, at the same time, unfortunately, in the PC version of the game, there have been in-game issues experienced by many players, which we really apologise to the player base for all of these problems.
Yamanaka said the team has now shipped two urgent patches. “The CPU processing load issue has been greatly improved now as of the latest patch,” he said. “However, the team is still hard at work to continue working on resolving remaining issues.”
Asked directly how Arc System Works intends to win back players burned by the PC build, Yamanaka did not soften the answer.
I do think that it’s an extremely challenging task that we need to undertake, where we sincerely want to put all of our effort forward to create an environment where the players can experience this game that we’ve worked so hard to create, and that we do have a lot of confidence that the game itself will be really fun for them.
He extended the apology specifically to PC buyers who bounced off the game or refunded it: “I would just like to express my sincere apologies for all of those issues that they've experienced.” He added that the trust lost “will not be an easy task at all to regain,” but said it is “an issue that we're facing head-on.”
The numbers behind the apology are on Steam. Tokon launched to a Mixed rating, with 47% of English-language reviews recommending it. VGC reports the game hit a peak concurrent player count of more than 24,000 near launch and is currently drawing around 4,000 daily concurrents according to SteamDB.
Yamanaka closed by thanking launch buyers and pointing at the only lever the studio has left. “So the team will continue to work together as one to try to provide a game that the players can enjoy even more than the initial version of the game,” he said. “And all we can do is do our best and pray that that sentiment will reach the player base.”