"Seriously mind boggling": Resident Evil 4 remake dumps controversial DRM on Steam after 1 month and a ton of performance issues

One month after the Resident Evil 4 remake got some fancy new DRM on Steam, almost three years after it came out, Capcom's taken it off. The update follows complaints of performance issues stemming from the change, as players encountered slowdown across both cutscenes and gameplay.

According to the survival horror classic's SteamDB page, you can see the Enigma Protector was taken off as of March 3. Previously, the re-release of Resi 4 had Denuvo, a common protective software, and that was tagged out for Enigma on February 3.

However, this caused fluctuations, as people started noticing sudden dips in how the game ran. "My frame timing is absolutely horrendous. Dipping so low that I'm moving in slow motion at times," said one player on the Steam forums. "Capcom, please fix this game this is getting insane right now, you simply destroyed the performance of the game for no good reason," another added.

Testing by Digital Foundry found a discrepancy of up to 40% between how the fourth mainline Resident Evil used to run versus how it does with Enigma bogging it down. We've had no word from Capcom on exactly why the publisher chose to switch DRMs, though a prevalent theory is that Denuvo eventually stops being cost effective to maintain, and Enigma's considerably cheaper.

Fans are happy to see the back end of the software, but some are questioning the logic in gatekeeping a game this old. "I have no idea what management was thinking considering the game's age by now," says one commenter on Reddit. "Seriously mind boggling move from Capcom," says another.

Resident Evil Requiem just released with Denuvo on Valve's store, and we'll have to see if Capcom eventually switches that over to Enigma as well. Given the results here, hopefully not, as it seems more trouble than it's worth.

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