Last month, Capcom swapped out the digital rights management (DRM) software in 2023’s Resident Evil 4 remake on Steam. The new DRM caused massive performance problems, upsetting players who had been playing the game fine until then. Capcom has seemingly realized this was a dumb decision and has now quietly removed the anti-tamper DRM from RE4.
In early February, without any warning or heads up, Capcom removed Denuvo DRM from the Resident Evil 4 remake and replaced it with Enigma, a DRM solution that is even more hated than the controversial Denuvo. And almost immediately after making this change to the PC version of RE4, players began noticing performance drops that hadn’t been happening before. YouTuber ItalicMaze used a mod to restore the game’s previous version on Steam and then compared how the game runs with and without Enigma. The results were bad, with the new DRM seemingly causing significant FPS drops, especially during action-heavy moments. Digital Foundry did similar testing and found a roughly 20-percent drop in performance. Ouch. People online yelled at Capcom a lot about this, and now the publisher has gotten the message and ripped the new DRM out.
On March 3, just 28 days after updating RE4 and adding Enigma, Capcom updated the game again, this time removing the new DRM from it. This can be spotted via SteamDB’s changelog for Resident Evil 4 remake. It now seems like RE4 on Steam has no DRM.
Kotaku has reached out to Capcom to get confirmation of Enigma’s removal and to find out if it could return.
This isn’t the first time a Resident Evil game has featured DRM that ruins performance. Something similar happened with Resident Evil Village in 2021. Pirated versions of the horror sequel reportedly ran better than the official Steam release because they lacked DRM. Two years later, in April 2023, Capcom removed Denuvo from Resident Evil Village. It didn’t replace it with a new DRM as it did with RE4 last month.
Hopefully, this whole RE4 situation was a test, and the resulting bad press and terrible performance have scared Capcom away from repeating it with older PC games in the future.