Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls May Be Another Example Of DRM Causing Issues

The announcement that Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is running poorly on PC has created another issue for PC gamers in the Fighting Game Community (FGC). Concerns over the game’s performance on PC have led at least one tournament organizer to restrict its use to the PS5 exclusively. Since the game’s release, cracked PC versions have emerged, and they perform significantly better than the official Steam version.

A recent X user, @NockCS, produced a comparison video that showcased the stark difference in frame rates between the cracked and official Steam versions. The cracked version consistently met or exceeded the 60fps mark, while the official Steam version only occasionally managed to maintain 50fps. The average discrepancy between the two was around 15fps, but there were instances where it reached nearly 40fps. The poster mentioned that the lag makes the game feel and play significantly worse.

Another X user, @MattWilliamson9, claimed 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." This improved performance was evident even when running the cracked version on a laptop with an NVIDIA GTX 1650 GPU, well below the minimum recommended GPU requirement of an RTX 2060.

The issue at hand is not that of piracy, but rather the impact of DRM (Digital Rights Management) on the end-user experience. In this case, Theia, a DRM solution developed at least partially by Sony, is seemingly causing performance problems on PC. Its decryption process forces the CPU to work non-stop on a single thread, thereby throttling the overall gaming experience. Although Theia is not the sole culprit for the performance issues, its implementation has evidently led to a frustrating experience for paying customers.