Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls does not come out until Thursday, and 1,054 people have already signed up to compete in it at America’s biggest fighting game tournament of the summer.
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Registration for CEO has now closed, which means the numbers are final rather than a running count. Street Fighter 6 drew 1,111 entrants. Marvel Tokon landed 57 behind it. Tekken 8, which has anchored majors since 2024, finished on 783.
Signing up for a game nobody has played
Take a second with that middle number, because it is genuinely strange.
Street Fighter 6 has been out since 2023. Players have spent years learning it, and it is still producing headline results, including a 15-year-old taking the Esports World Cup title last week. Tekken 8 has had a competitive scene for two years. Marvel Tokon has had a beta and a lot of trailers.
Over a thousand people still paid to enter a bracket in a game they cannot practise yet. They are betting on a four-versus-four fighter from Arc System Works, published by Sony, on the strength of the studio’s reputation and the Marvel name.
CEO is also the first event of this size to run the game at all, so there is no prior form to go on. Nobody knows which characters are strong. Nobody has a match-up chart.
Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls is not a one-off spike
Novelty could explain away a single tournament. The pattern holds elsewhere, though.
Evo France, the new European major arriving in October, had Marvel Tokon sitting third for registered players last week. That is a different continent, a different crowd, and a date far enough out that early excitement has had time to cool.
Two majors on two continents, both ranking it near the top, before release. That is the part worth noting rather than any single figure.
What the numbers do and do not tell you
Some caution is fair here. Tournament sign-ups measure intent, not staying power. Pre-release hype also flatters a fighting game more than any other moment. Plenty of games have filled a launch bracket and thinned out by the following season.
Entry counts also flatter games that are new and cheap to try. A veteran Tekken player has no reason to enter a bracket they have entered ten times before, while a new game pulls in the curious.
Still, the comparison is against a genre leader rather than an empty field, and it is holding across separate events. For a game arriving on PS5 and PC on 6 August at 59.99 dollars, that is a strong starting position. If you are planning to jump in, our guide to how team order works and why it is not like King of Fighters covers the system most newcomers get wrong first. Eurogamer gathered the registration figures from the event pages.
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