It’s no secret that Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls has been having trouble on PC. The game has a “Mixed” user score on Steam, with only 47% of players leaving a positive review, with most detractors criticizing performance issues. Users report trouble maintaining a consistent frame rate, crashes, online play problems, and more on machines that are well above the developer-recommended specs.
Considering that the PlayStation 5 version of the game doesn’t run into many of these issues, there was speculation that some form of digital rights management (DRM) software was to blame. Big publishers often lean on controversial software solutions like Denuvo to make it harder for users to pirate a game. Unfortunately, this type of software often hogs resources and makes games run worse.
In the case of Marvel Tokon, players have managed to “crack” the game — bypass its DRM — in just 11 days, according to the site CrackWatch. Shortly after, a Reddit user posted that despite running into significant performance problems in the game’s recent open beta, they could run the cracked version at a smooth 60 frames per second on the highest quality settings. They also found they didn’t need to preload the game’s shaders for a smooth experience, which is a prerequisite on the official version. That said, the user noted they still ran into a few stutters when performing supers and in the game’s menus. Several users on the ResetEra message board also said the cracked version ran significantly more smoothly on their computers.
The Reddit user notes that while the game runs significantly better without its DRM software, there are several other background programs that could still be hurting performance. Marvel Tokon runs several instances of Sony’s SDK (which is used for the controversial PlayStation Network integration), as well as the software Easy Anti-Cheat, which could be causing additional problems.
While Sony likely added DRM to the Steam version to limit piracy and avoid data mining, players have already found ways to dig through the game’s files and discover leaked characters (Deadpool actually jokes about this in-game, with a line that acknowledges character leaks on Reddit). Basically, the game’s DRM seems to have failed its main objective of keeping pirates away, while giving paying PC customers a dramatically worse experience.
While it’s not uncommon for publishers to eventually remove DRM from their games after initial release, this usually takes several months if not years. Hopefully, it doesn’t take that long for Marvel Tokon or these issues may continue to eat into the game’s popularity.
