Why it matters: Sony Interactive Entertainment released Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls earlier this month, and things are not going well. The Marvel-focused fighting game is turning many PC players away, as technical issues are spoiling an otherwise enjoyable fighting game experience.
The DRM Sony uses to lock down Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls on PC is so aggressive that people with massively capable gaming machines are complaining about performance and network instability. The developers have already released a patch to fix some of the issues, but the number of people playing the game is quickly collapsing anyway.
A few days after the game’s original release, there is now a general consensus about the main culprit behind its performance problems. The “Rune” crew recently released a cracked version of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, stripping away the multiple DRM layers used by the game. Marvel Tokon’s PC version employs both the Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) middleware and Theia.
The Theia DRM is not disclosed anywhere on the game’s Steam page. Many users have remarked how this particular protection can have a significant impact on how a game runs, calling it even worse than the much-maligned Denuvo DRM in terms of performance hit. The kernel-level EAC protection doesn’t help, either.
Many users have reported the alleged impact of Theia, EAC, and other protections on their systems. On older gaming laptops equipped with weak GPUs and CPUs, the cracked release of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls can allegedly run at a steady 60 FPS. On the same systems, the original game can barely reach 45 frames per second.
Judging from the Steam reviews, Marvel Tokon’s technical issues are making the game miserable even on much more powerful systems equipped with high-end AMD CPUs, top-tier Nvidia GPUs, and truly massive amounts of DRAM. Players concur that the game is a “mess,” advising potential buyers to stay away from the store until the developers have fixed the most outstanding performance issues.
Many users took the advice seriously, and Marvel Tokon’s sales are suffering as a consequence. The number of concurrent players is now a fraction of what it used to be just two weeks ago, with Steam reviews repeatedly bashing the product. The game is available on both PC and PlayStation 5, where users have had none of the issues experienced by Windows players.
Console gamers are now disabling cross-platform multiplayer with PC, as a degraded network and performance experience is eventually going to spoil the fun for both parties. Developers at Arc System Works promised to further improve Marvel Tokon’s PC experience, but many users are now just asking the Japanese studio, or publisher Sony, to completely eradicate the Theia DRM from the game.
Meanwhile, pirates playing the cracked release are once again enjoying the “best” version of the game performance-wise. So far, the only downside is that online play is limited to peer-to-peer connections via third-party tools.