It took just eleven days for players to pull the DRM out of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls — and by most accounts, the cracked build performs better than the copy people actually bought.
Things have gone badly for the PC version since day one. Steam user reviews currently sit at “Mixed,” with only 47% of ratings positive, and the criticism keeps circling back to a single issue: performance. Unstable frame rates, crashes and online connectivity faults are being reported by players whose hardware sits well above the developer’s recommended specifications.
None of that plagues the PlayStation 5 build to anywhere near the same degree. That discrepancy is precisely what led people to suspect digital rights management software was to blame.
Why everyone pointed at the DRM
Major publishers lean on solutions such as Denuvo to raise the barrier against piracy. The downside is thoroughly documented and widely loathed: the software has a habit of eating system resources and weighing games down.
Once the crack surfaced, one Reddit user wrote that the game’s recent open beta had given them serious performance headaches, yet the cracked version held a steady 60 frames per second with quality settings maxed out. On top of that, they skipped the shader preloading step the official build demands for smooth playback. A handful of stutters still crept in during supers and while navigating menus.
Posters on the ResetEra forums reported an identical experience: on their systems, the cracked build was clearly the better performer.
DRM isn’t the only thing running in the background
That same Reddit user added a caveat. Strip out the DRM and there are still other background processes capable of dragging frame rates down. Marvel Tokon spins up multiple instances of Sony’s SDK — the layer behind the heavily debated PlayStation Network integration — alongside Easy Anti-Cheat. Any one of those could be contributing.
The part that stings
The assumption is that Sony attached DRM to the Steam release to curb piracy and deter data miners. Players combed through the game’s files and surfaced leaked characters regardless. Deadpool even riffs on it in-game, delivering a line that nods to the character leaks circulating on Reddit.
Which means the protection whiffed on its sole responsibility, while paying PC customers were handed a far worse experience as a parting gift.
Publishers do strip DRM out eventually — though the wait is typically measured in months, occasionally years. Should Marvel Tokon take that route, these issues will keep eroding whatever audience the game still holds.
Bad PC port. Hulk no like.