Capcom to patch Resident Evil Village after discovery that pirated version runs better

After the discovery that a free, pirated version of Resident Evil: Village runs faster than the version on Steam, Capcom has promised players a new patch to address the issues. It’s embarrassing that a pirated version of the horror survival game is more optimized than the official version. Unfortunately, this all boils down to how CPU-heavy the DRM countermeasures are.

According to Digital Foundry, the hacker who released the cracked version of the game found two DRM systems clogging up Resident Evil: Village. Those systems were removed from the pirated version. The combination of Denuvo, plus Capcom’s in-house anti-piracy tech, cause the game to run sub-optimally.

A strange turn of events

The Digital Foundry team at Eurogamer confirmed these rumors to be true. After experiencing the cracked version themselves, they said combat with enemies, and the daughters of Lady Dimitrescu no longer stutter like the Steam version. You can watch a full breakdown made by Digital Foundry below.

Capcom said it will investigate a patch for Resident Evil: Village and address these issues, seemingly admitting to the issues surrounding the DRM. However, Denuvo stated that it is not the root cause of performance issues for the game, sending the following statement to PC Gamer:

“…we have run multiple tests on multiple machines and there is no difference in-game experience on the legitimate version protected with Denuvo Anti-Tamper, versus the unprotected version without Denuvo Anti-Tamper.”

This hasn’t been a great time for the Resident Evil franchise as a whole. Village has come with its own issues, such as accusations of piracy in regards to the monster designs. In other news, the spinoff Re:Verse was delayed again. Not to mention, Capcom has a history with poor PC ports combined with aggressive DRM usage. The same accusation was made against the PC port for Devil May Cry 5, after all.

Regardless of Capcom’s history, this reveals one glaring issue. If DRM doesn’t prevent piracy and hinders performance, then what’s the point at all?