Capcom ditches Resident Evil 4 Remake's new, performance-choking DRM

If you want to enjoy the majority of Capcom’s latest games on Steam, Denuvo DRM is a piece of baggage you will have to live with. Monster Hunter Wilds, Street Fighter 6, Resident Evil Requiem – all of them use it, and upcoming sci-fi game Pragmata will as well. Strangely, despite its widespread use of Denuvo, Capcom decided last month that for its excellent Resident Evil 4 Remake it would switch DRM software to something called Enigma Protector. However, just 28 days later, it’s thrown Enigma out, following reports of performance issues.

Enigma isn’t by any means an unknown quantity for Capcom – it’s used the service in the past, and many of its older titles on Steam (such as Resident Evil 5 or Capcom Arcade Stadium) still use it over Denuvo. However, the latter has been the go-to DRM provider for all of its recent big hitters. Resident Evil 4 players were rather surprised when an update was made to the 2023 remake, replacing Denuvo with Enigma. You can clearly see this change in the horror game’s SteamDB update logs for February 3 of this year.

Following the addition of Enigma, players began to report a drop in PC performance. This was then investigated by the folks at Digital Foundry, who confirmed that, in some scenarios, there was a significant drop in CPU throughput versus the previous version of the game that used Denuvo. While it didn’t do much to trouble Resident Evil 4’s glittering lifetime Steam user score of 95%, the performance problems did result in a noticeable spike of negative reviews, as you can see on the right side graph below.

Now, 28 days after that update, Capcom appears to have removed Enigma Protector from the game. On its SteamDB logs, you can see it getting struck off in an update that landed today, March 3, and on its actual Steam page, the notice about Enigma DRM is no longer visible.

While I highly doubt this will last, it also looks like Denuvo has not been reinstated yet, leaving Resident Evil 4 in DRM purgatory. There is zero mention of any third-party DRM providers on Resi 4’s Steam page and the SteamDb data doesn’t show that it’s been added back in either. If you’re the passionate, anti-DRM type, I wouldn’t celebrate too wildly though – I can envisage Capcom plugging this gap fairly quickly, given how Denuvo still plays a part in all its biggest games right now and how popular Resident Evil 4 remains.

Of course, if you really want DRM-free gaming, GOG is the logical place to go – however, you sadly won’t find Resident Evil 4 or newcomer Requiem over there at the moment. GOG does still have some classics from the series though, including the first three Resi games.