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Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Soul is reigniting the debate around DRM, amid reports a new DRM-free cracked version is performing better than Sony's widely lambasted official PC version.

When Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls launched on PC earlier this month, it was heavily criticised for a range of significant performance problems, including stuttering framerates and network issues. While a patch was quickly released that improved the PC version for a substantial portion of the player base, performance woes persisted for others.

Watch a trailer for Cyclops in Marvel Tōkon here.Watch on YouTube

Given Marvel Tōkon's console release was largely free of problems, many speculated the presence of DRM in the Steam version was the cause of high CPU usage and other issues. And now, following the emergence of a cracked PC version, there's evidence to suggest the DRM may have been a culprit after all.

A variety of social media posts and reports have now surfaced from those who have played the cracked version, claiming it performs better than the official PC release. This video, posted by X user NockCS, shows both versions side by side to convey the difference in FPS.

Raion, another user reporting performance issues with the official version, claims the cracked version was significantly less draining on their CPU, even when playing at the highest graphical settings. Alphine, another Marvel Tōkon player, posted a video showing the game seemingly running on low settings on a GTX1650 - hardware well below the minimum recommended specs listed on Steam. This is highly irregular, the minimum recommended specs on Steam tend to be a pretty firm bar for playability.

It's worth noting these are second-hand claims and should be taken with a grain of salt, though the number of these claims is itself noteworthy. And, of course, cracked games can be vehicles for malware and malicious code, so it is not advised to download one.

As for an official response to the claims, Eurogamer has contacted Sony but is yet to receive a reply at the time of writing. A recent social media post from the Marvel Tōkon account did promise further fixes to the PC version, but a quick glance at the responses show word of the crack has spread - and the comparisons in performance have left some fans disheartened.

Marvel Tōkon is a great game, but without more meaningful technical fixes from Sony and Arc Systems, a cloud hangs over the PC version's future. Matchmaking times on the platform have already taken a hit as people step away from the game while awaiting much-needed fixes. In addition, many console players have turned off matchmaking to avoid PC players - performance issues affect the experience for both players in online matches - exacerbating the issue. One look at the Steamdb page for Marvel Tōkon shows a steady drop since its launch earlier this month, from a concurrent peak of 24,498 to a 24-hour peak of 5,249.

Furthermore, with some PC players turning to the cracked version of Marvel Tōkon in the hope of finding better performance, the matchmaking pool could shrink still further. The cracked game doesn't support online play via in-game matchmaking thanks to the removal of background processes, and instead requires players to play peer-to-peer via third party programs like Parsec. While one can assume the number of players who'll go to all this effort would be relatively small, even a few hundred could have a meaningful impact on dwindling player counts.

It's also an interesting situation for the genre as a whole. Fighting games are no strangers to cracks. Back before Tekken 8's release, a beta version of the game was cracked by naughty ne'er-do-wells, prompting Bandai Namco to publicly ask people not to play it and threatening bans for those who were found to have partaken in such activities. The same was true for Street Fighter 6: once again a cracked version of a beta was circulated among its most competitive players pre-launch.

This, on the other hand, is a cracked version of the full game which, if reports of technical improvements are true, could mean real gameplay advantages over the official version. That could impact PC sales alongside the health of the playerbase sticking with the official version. The stakes go a bit further than the competitive integrity of tournaments here, which was the primary concern with those aforementioned cracks.

It's also, on a more macro scale, another entry in the ongoing saga of DRM and its impact on performance. DRM has been blamed for poor PC performance on numerous occasions, and in some instances, evidence has surfaced - such as Digital Foundry's testing of Resident Evil 4 on PC - confirming the link.

Will we see Sony and Arc Systems remove Marvel Tōkon's DRM in an effort to tackle ongoing technical issues and limit interest in the cracked version? Time will tell.