It’s potentially another episode of DRM causing problems, folks. Following the launch of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, its performance on PC looks to be a pretty regular complaint within the FGC. It’s gotten bad enough that at least one tourney organiser has announced earlier in the month that it will only run the game on the PS5. More recently, it looks like cracked PC versions of the title have appeared, and as you may have expected, it’s running a lot smoother than the one you pay for.
One particular clip, shared by X user @NockCS, has the two versions of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls running side-by-side, complete with the new Steam FPS counter. The clip shows the cracked version staying consistently closer to 60fps, while the official Steam version looks to be struggling to even maintain 50fps. The average discrepancy looks to be around 15fps between the two, but the poster says that at its worst, it’s “almost a 40fps difference”.
Another X user, @MattWilliamson9, claims that the cracked version of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls “literally runs 10x better now, even on [the] highest settings, I am barely using 45% of my CPU”. Tangentially, X user @Alperen5841 showed the cracked version running on a laptop with an NVIDIA GTX 1650 GPU, which is way below the minimum requirement of an RTX 2060.
It’s worth noting though that in this instance of DRM punishing paying customers, Denuvo is not to blame. According to KitGuru, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls uses something called Theia, which is at least partially developed by Sony. And what makes this particular flavour of DRM slow the game down to a crawl is the way it forces the CPU to decrypt files during active gameplay on a single CPU thread.
Of course, here’s the obligatory reminder that we’re not condoning piracy. But it bears repeating that, as long as the number of cases of DRM causing problems for paying customers is higher than zero, videogame publishers and DRM makers are legitimising piracy on their very own, without any outside help or interference.
(Source: X [1], [2], [3], iXBT.games, KitGuru)
