Eleven days. That’s how long it took players to strip the DRM out of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, and the cracked build is apparently outperforming the version people paid for.
The PC release has been a mess since launch. User reviews on Steam sit at “Mixed,” with just 47% of players leaving a positive rating, and most of the complaints point the same direction: performance. Players report frame rates that won’t hold steady, crashes and online play problems on rigs that comfortably clear the developer’s recommended specs.
The PlayStation 5 version doesn’t suffer from most of this. That gap is what got people speculating that digital rights management software was the culprit.
Why everyone pointed at the DRM
Big publishers reach for tools like Denuvo to make piracy harder. The tradeoff is well documented and deeply unpopular: that software tends to hog resources and drag games down.
After the crack landed, a Reddit user posted that they’d hit significant performance trouble during the game’s recent open beta, but could run the cracked version at a smooth 60 frames per second on the highest quality settings. They also didn’t need to preload the game’s shaders, which the official version requires for a smooth experience. They did still hit a few stutters during supers and in the menus.
Users on the ResetEra message board said the same thing: the cracked build ran noticeably better on their machines.
DRM isn’t the only thing running in the background
The same Reddit user was careful about this. Even without the DRM, other background processes could be dragging performance down. Marvel Tokon runs several instances of Sony’s SDK, which powers the much-argued-about PlayStation Network integration, plus Easy Anti-Cheat. Any of that could be adding to the problem.
The part that stings
Sony presumably bolted DRM onto the Steam version to limit piracy and discourage data mining. Players have already dug through the game’s files and turned up leaked characters anyway. Deadpool jokes about it in-game, with a line acknowledging character leaks on Reddit.
So the protection failed at the one job it had, and paying PC customers got a dramatically worse experience as the consolation prize.
Publishers do pull DRM out eventually. It usually takes months, sometimes years. If Marvel Tokon waits that long, these problems will keep chewing through whatever popularity the game has left.
Bad PC port. Hulk no like.
