Well, here we are with yet another terrible PC port of a potentially great game. Star Wars Jedi Survivor launched today and it’s been a complete mess. A large part of the problem is the heavily restrictive DRM (Digital Rights Management) via the Denuvo. Denuvo is a highly aggressive and controversial system that PC players have complained continuously about.
Reading through posts on Reddit, performance testers have had Denuvo shut down testing after just two hardware changes. This makes it virtually impossible to perform any sort of testing on the games performance. However, that may not be necessary as players have been reporting abysmal performance on even elite hardware. Some have reported that their RTX 4090 GPUs are incapable of hitting even 30 to 45 FPS in this $69 to $89 game regardless of settings.
The development team has acknowledged the issue in quite frankly one of the worst “we’re working on it” replies I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading.
Clearly it’s the PC players fault for owning a PC, and there is no way to fix it. However, they’re still working on it so please don’t return the game and keep buying it. /S
Sadly, Jedi Survivor is just the latest game released for PC that is utterly broken at launch. Games such as Forspoken, Wild Hearts, Hogwarts Legacy, Wo Long, and The Last of Us have all had major issues at launch that in some cases, made them unplayable on the PC.
What’s causing this? It probably can be summoned up with tight release schedules and publishers pushing for console and not PC optimizations. That worked fine in the past when the PS4 was the performance standard. You can basically use a Pentium dual core and 750Ti to match its performance level. However, the PS5 and XSX both have 8 core Zen 2 CPUs coupled with GPUs that have gone toe to toe with RTX 2080 Super and RTX 3060Ti GPUs. In addition, they come with 16GB of RAM and high speed NVME SSDs.
Basically put, if developers don’t actually have the time to optimize the PC launches, the games will struggle. It’s not that these consoles are faster than high gaming PCs as they are objectively not. The games are just more optimized and there are more consoles sold which means more motivation to cater to them.
Is there a solution? None I can think of are good. You could boycott the PC release but then your hardware goes unused. You could buy the console version, but then you have all the limitations of console gaming. As for me, I’m just diving back into my Steam backlog and waiting the six months it takes to get these games fixed.
