Capcom Slaps Crappy DRM On Steam Ports Of Dino Crisis 1 & 2

The first two Dino Crisis games, originally released on the PlayStation 1 over 25 years ago, have finally made their way over to Steam. That’s cool, but uh, wait a minute here, did Capcom include performance-killing DRM on these retro releases? Yes. Yes, it did.

On February 12, Capcom announced a fun little surprise for Dino Crisis fans. No, it wasn’t a new game or a remake or even a fancy remaster. Instead, Capcom revealed that 1999’s Dino Crisis and its 2000 sequel, Dino Crisis 2, were now available to buy on Valve’s large digital PC gaming store, Steam. As mentioned already, that’s cool. I mean, the games have been available on GOG for a bit and can be easily emulated on fairly weak PCs, but it’s always nice to see publishers bringing older games to more platforms and stores. Except, fans quickly spotted something silly: Dino Crisis 1 and 2 on Steam include Enigma Protector DRM.

Kotaku has contacted Capcom, but didn’t hear back before publication.

Over on the Dino Crisis Steam forums, you can see plenty of people yelling at Capcom about this incredibly silly and frankly stupid decision. “DRM on a 27-year-old game? Really? What’s wrong with these guys?” asked one user. Others pointed out that this is the same DRM that Capcom recently added to its years-old Resident Evil 4 remake. And that was a disaster, causing all sorts of performance problems for many users on PC.

This is made all the more strange by the fact that these Dino Crisis PC ports seem to be the same versions being sold currently on GOG with zero DRM. For whatever reason, Capcom has decided that the same games available DRM-free on GOG should include crappy DRM that people hate if you buy them on Steam. As you can expect, a lot of people are opting to buy Dino Crisis on GOG until Capcom removes the DRM.