Capcom starts adding anti-cheat and anti-modding "Enigma Protector" DRM to older titles on Steam
Capcom has been in the spotlight these past years due to their successful new entries in beloved franchises like Resident Evil, Street Fighter and Monster Hunter. However, during these past years they have had their fair share of controversy as well, like using Denuvo DRM in some of their titles, which has been proven to affect performance of titles like Resident Evil 8 compared with the same game with DRM removed, and today, something similar has been making the rounds online, as Capcom has been caught updating older titles with an intrusive DRM.
Resident Evil: Revelations was one such title, in which Capcom added a sneaky update on January 8th for Steam, which seemed to fix a couple bugs still remaining from the release (like fixing Jill's Samurai Edge's weapon recognition), but also added Enigma Protector DRM, which started to cause issues with mods already installed for the game, causing it to crash. Mega Man Zero/ZX Collection, Mega Man Battle Network Collection and Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective have also been titles affected by this intrusive DRM update by Capcom as well.
The "Enigma Protector" DRM is yet another type of protection for executable files, and when implemented into games, it basically strips away the option to use cheats and mods into said games through a series of memory checks. Adding to this, it's important to note that a lot of Capcom's older titles up to this day still retain a lot of bugs, glitches, and even possible game breaking issues, which to this day have yet to be addressed officially by Capcom, and leaves only the fanbase to take action and fix some of these issues through mods, and with the inclusion of this DRM, some of these fanmade fixes could end up being completely broken, effectively rendering certain older games unplayable to some users.
However, the issues don't stop with just disabling modding and cheats for single player games, but it also has been confirmed to cause performance issues in titles with this DRM implemented, reducing framerate for some titles from 10 to up to 20 fps in some dire cases.
Given the whole ordeal, users went into the Enigma Protector threads to bring forth the problem of their DRM causing performance problems when implemented into their games,
It's important to note that as of January 9th, a statement was issued on Steam, mentioning that there was an issue observed in the January 8th update, and that the update will be rolled back, but they specify that once the issue is resolved, the update will be added back once again.
Regarding the update said:
This seems to be yet another instance of DRM affecting legitimate users and legitimate users only, since those that desire it can either roll back the update through some of Steam's options, or just completely sail the high seas and play a cracked version of the games, more so for older and single player titles that have played just fine and have thrived from the modding scene without official interference for decades at this point.
To add salt to injury, titles that have seen this intrusive DRM added into them are no longer working on Steam Deck.
For those interested in how to roll back updates through Steam, user @MaxiBash has provided instructions on how to roll back the updates for the affected games on Steam so far in a post in this thread.
UPDATE:
A supposed list of more Capcom games that have been affected by Capcom's inclusion of the Enigma Protector DRM has surfaced:
Resident Evil: Revelations "Regarding the update" notice Original Enigma DRM thread and archived link
