Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls shows early signs of popularity, soaring up tournament entry leaderboards

Marvel Tokon will be released unto the world by the terrible trio of Marvel, Sony, and Arc System Works later this week. While only the most talented of fortune tellers can say for sure how popular it will be, early indicators from fighting game tournament registration numbers paint a positive picture.

As seen on the Start.gg page for upcoming American fighting game tournament CEO - major national event for the region - 1054 attendees signed up for the Marvel Tokon bracket by the time registration closed. To compare, Street Fighter 6 came in at 1,111, and Tekken 8 has 783 entrants.

This reflects previous figures posted from other massive tournaments elsewhere in the world. Evo France, the relatively new major coming to Europe in October, had Marvel Tokon come in strong with the third-highest number of registered players last week.

Now, there are some asterisks to bear in mind. Obviously, players who enter tournaments are not necessarily reflective of the entire playerbase. A substantial majority of players likely won't travel to compete, so take this as a screenshot of what genre enthusiasts consider exciting right now. In addition, as anyone who's gone to these sorts of events will know, new games that launch close to a tournament often garner ample sign-ups, as they are treated as a fun side-game where players can muck about with other relatively inexperienced players.

Even so it's certainly a good indicator of popularity among the core target audience for Tokon. These final sign up figures for CEO and Evo France come following the Marvel Tokon July open beta, which seemingly performed exceptionally well despite technical issues on PC and a PSN outage hampering the fun.

Whether this popularity among the genre's fiercest fans will largely depend on whether grassroots communities will continue to support it, whether the technical issues are resolved by the time it releases later this week, and of course whether it is fun or not. Still, a good start for the triple-A tag fighter.