Capcom yank Resident Evil 4 Remake's Enigma DRM, which had reportedly impacted the horror flick's performance

Out of the Denuvo, into the Enigma, and now hopefully DRM-free

Image credit: Capcom

While Resident Evil Requiem's been hoovering up most of the Resi attention as of late, Capcom have managed to drag the Resident Evil 4 Remake back into the headlines. The game's just had Enigma DRM quietly pulled from it, following a recent swap to that software from Devuvo DRM which reportedly had an impact on how well the Resi 4 Remake ran.

As spotted by game news poster Wario64, SteamDB indicates the Enigma DRM was removed in the wee hours of this morning, March 3rd. This marks the end of a very brief run in Resi 4 for the software, which was only added in as of February 3rd, replacing the Denuvo DRM which the game launched with.

Why would Capcom suddenly decide to jettison DRM they only put in place about a month ago? Well, the Enigma DRM has been accused of impacting the remake's performance since it arrived, with testing in early February by tech boffins Digital Foundry having backed this up.

In comparing a version of Resi 4 following the addition of Enigma to a previous version (the reversion was achieved via a mod which looks to since have been removed), the site's Alex Battaglia found that more CPU performance than usual was being sucked away by other tasks in the version with Enigma in the game's intro cutscene. Though he noted that from there, things get a bit more complicated:

Immediately after the intro, we move into gameplay where the deficit shifts to a 20 percent drop in performance. However, moving further into the game sees something curious happen...In short, CPU performance seems to have various bottlenecks - zombie AI can supersede the impact of DRM, but where there are no zombies, the DRM can really make itself known in terms of depressed frame-rates.

Far from an ideal shift for a three year old game, especially given the headaches such a change can cause for modders. Then again, Capcom have said before that they're rather terrified of the potential for some mods to add in stuff which could be seen to harm the publishers' reputation and/or be "offensive to public order and morals". To be fair to them, they were clear in that 2023 presentation that they don't see all mods as evil. Rather ironically, though, one of the instances they cited in terms of mods potentially causing reputation harm concerned players who suffer performance problems as a result of mods blaming those technical woes on Capcom.