Capcom has seemingly removed a controversial new DRM system from Resident Evil 4 Remake on Steam after players reported it was negatively impacting performance.
While not formally announced by the developer, an update to the game’s Steam database, captured by SteamDB on 3rd March, prompted fans to notice that the game’s Enigma anti-piracy system – introduced in February – had been removed once more.
As spotted by Digital Foundry, Enigma’s addition to the almost three-year-old game last month almost instantly dragged CPU performance, particularly during cutscenes on lower-end systems.
Enigma DRM has been removed from Resident Evil 4 Remake
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“Updating years-old software with new DRM is just stupid,” Alex Battaglia said in a DF video on the topic.
“Like, stop – don’t do that in the first place. Regardless of any possible performance degradations, what it’ll do to your game is just piss off your audience. It’ll make your modding scene really upset.”
While PC players are relieved that Capcom has removed Enigma, most are left wondering why the change was made in the first place, and if there’s any possibility that this will happen again.
“We’re talking about Enigma, DRM they added after release, as a public experimentation with a new, cheaper DRM,” explained one player on Reddit. “That DRM proved to be completely useless and detrimental, so they removed it. It’s not the first time they’ve done this with Enigma and this was just the latest public experiment.”
“I’m guessing they’ll add it back if they figure out how to avoid the huge performance drop it was causing,” lamented someone else.
Last week, Capcom revealed Resident Evil Requiem has already surpassed 5m sales in less than a week. Meanwhile, the Resident Evil series as a whole has shifted over 183m units as of 31st December.