Capcom has officially removed the Denuvo anti-tamper technology from its popular survival horror game, Resident Evil Village. According to Dark Side of Gaming, an update for the game released recently eliminates the digital rights management (DRM) system. This change has been verified by SteamDB’s change tracker, which states: “Removed 3rd-Party DRM – Denuvo Anti-tamper, 5 different PC within a day machine activation limit.”
The removal of Denuvo will likely be welcomed by players who had been avoiding the Steam version of the game due to performance issues reportedly caused by the DRM. When Resident Evil Village was first released in May 2021, players complained about severe performance issues in the PC version. Some players believed that Denuvo, which runs in the background, was partially responsible for these problems.
This theory gained more support when a cracked version of the game, which removed the copy protection, was released in July 2021 and demonstrated noticeably better performance than the official release. The hackers responsible for this cracked version claimed that the game’s content protection included both Denuvo and Capcom’s own copy protection, with the publisher’s anti-piracy measures embedded within Denuvo, “making it even less optimal.”
In response, Capcom released a patch later that month aimed at improving performance, specifically stating that they had made “adjustments to optimize the anti-piracy technology.” However, it was unclear whether Denuvo, Capcom’s own copy protection, or their combined efforts were causing the performance issues.
Now that Denuvo has been completely removed from Resident Evil Village, it remains to be seen if this change will lead to further performance improvements.
Capcom typically includes Denuvo in its major PC releases, such as Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 3 Remake, and Monster Hunter World, eventually removing the software in each case. However, Denuvo remained in Resident Evil Village for an unusually long time. Although the game’s anti-piracy software was cracked just a month after its launch, Capcom took nearly two years to officially remove Denuvo.
Despite its PC performance issues, Resident Evil Village was a commercial success, with Capcom announcing that the game shipped five million copies across all platforms faster than the previous three titles in the series.
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