Capcom has released a new update for Resident Evil Village that removes Denuvo from the 2021 survival horror game. The release of the update can be confirmed via SteamDB, whose listing for Resident Evil Village now includes a change about third-party DRM in the form of Denuvo anti-tamper having been removed on April 10, 2023. Digital Foundry shared a video in July 2021 that demonstrated how the cracked version of Resident Evil Village, which lacked copy protection, played much better, with smoother combat, and while Capcom had already released a PC performance patch to address Resident Evil Village’s “weird” performance on PC some time ago, the game should now run better than ever.
From a Digital Foundry transcript:
By stripping out what the hackers call Capcom’s entry points for the DRM… the game is absolutely transformed in those areas.
Fundamentally, the truth is that the cracked version of the game resolves the primary performance issues we encountered at launch, while two months on, those same issues remain unaddressed by Capcom.
If the people who hacked the game are being fully on the level, the evidence suggests that in a worst case scenario, anti-piracy measures have interfered with one of the core mechanics of the game, and that’s a red line that no developer or publisher should cross.
And in an alternative scenario, let’s assume that the people who hacked the game are not being truthful about the DRM. Well, then the only other plausible explanation is that they have managed to optimise the game in a way that Capcom wasn’t able to at launch, and which they haven’t been able to fix in over two months since then.