Don’t get too excited.
A little less than two years after Resident Evil Village launched on PC (May 2021), Capcom has removed Denuvo DRM from the game.
For those not in the know, Denuvo is a Digital Rights Management (a.k.a. antipiracy) software that is universally reviled by PC gamers. To the point that some basically consider it malware for how badly it impacts performance. There are cases known where users will buy a game to show support to the developer, and then immediately pirate it just to have a playable version that doesn’t run like garbage on their machine.
The news of Denuvo’s removal comes from VGC; the source of which being Dark Side of Gaming, which was verified by SteamDB, which tracks the update, which reads:
Removed 3rd-Party DRM – Denuvo Anti-tamper, 5 different PC within a day machine activation limit
Naturally, Resident Evil Village suffered under Denuvo much the same as almost every other modern game suffers under it: with poor performance. Capcom even released an update specifically to alleviate some of these issues with the software.
Nonetheless, Village seemed to have the DRM for far longer than other Capcom games on PC (pirates, naturally, cracked it a month after release). Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 3 Remake, and Monster Hunter World all launched with Denuvo, and all had it removed in a considerably shorter timeframe than Village. At least it’s gone now.
Resident Evil 4 Remake, on the other hand, still struggles under the weight of Denuvo. While not confirmed as the cause, it’s currently blamed for a spate of performance issues, from stuttering to file corruption. Which I’m sure magically disappear when Denuvo is out of the picture.
Source: PC Gamer