Capcom has removed the Denuvo Anti-Tamper software from Resident Evil Village. This development promises to spell the end of the Resident Evil Village PC stuttering that forced some fans to circumvent the survival horror's digital rights management (DRM) software despite owning a legitimate copy of the game.
As tends to be the case with most PC releases, Denuvo Anti-Tamper was a highly controversial addition to Resident Evil Village. Not least because this DRM feature wrecked performance on even some high-end hardware by upping the game's resource-intensiveness to the point of creating a CPU bottleneck. And while its sole purpose was to prevent piracy, the PC port of Resident Evil Village was still cracked within weeks of its May 2021 release by a hacker or group thereof known as EMPRESS.
Capcom has now removed Denuvo Anti-Tamper from Resident Evil Village as part of an April 10 update for the Steam version of the game. The move was made on the down-low, with no official announcement from the developer. However, multiple player testimonies and version control data scraped by SteamDB confirm that Denuvo is no more in the latest build of the game. This removal arrives just ahead of the survival horror's two-year anniversary, with Resident Evil Village's DRM hence persisting much longer compared to the series' previous mainline installment. For context, Capcom removed Denuvo from the Resident Evil 3 remake after just six months.
Denuvo was just a part of the anti-piracy measures implemented into Resident Evil Village. Capcom's Anti-Tamper V3 software still appears to be part of the package, although that safeguard was said to be a smaller performance hog than Denuvo Anti-Tamper, according to the group who cracked the game.
While the Denuvo creators naturally downplayed reports of their software's resource-intensiveness over the years, one thing to keep in mind is that this DRM is not a shrink-wrapped solution. In other words, implementing Denuvo isn't as simple as downloading and installing a dependency. Developers are instead expected to integrate their game code with this DRM as part of a convoluted process that—among other things—requires manually marking non-performance-impacting functions for obfuscation, according to Denuvo owner Irdeto. This would imply that the Resident Evil Village PC stuttering was mostly a result of poor implementation on Capcom's part.
Of course, the question of blame assignment is mostly irrelevant from a consumer's perspective. And while the recently released Resident Evil 4 remake also features Denuvo, its PC performance appears to be much better compared to the initial version of Resident Evil Village. Given that state of affairs, Capcom presumably won't be in a rush to remove Denuvo from the Resident Evil 4 remake, assuming such a move is even part of its long-term plans for the hit game.
Resident Evil Village is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.