Resident Evil Village Removes Denuvo Anti-Cheat DRM

Though there are reports of a sequel to 2021 action survival horror game Resident Evil Village is already in works, developer/publisher Capcom has yet to make an official announcement ahead of its heavily rumored 2024 release window.

A newly added VR support made RE: Village a launch title for recently launched PlayStation VR2 headset back in February 2023. Moreover, PC version of Resident Evil Village on Steam removes controversial Denuvo anti-cheat DRM lately.

Capcom has rolled out a new update today that seemingly removes Denuvo for PC version of RE Village. This was later verified by SteamDB change tracker, which confirmed removal of Denuvo with activation limit for 5 different PCs daily.

This will clearly encourage players who were avoiding Steam version because of various reports of Denuvo affecting overall performance. Upon initial launch in May 2021, PC version of Village was facing some severe performance issues.

Players were complaining about those issues and suggested this was caused by Denuvo, since it runs in the background. Such claims received more credibility when a cracked version came out later on and ran better than original version.

Digital Foundry technology editor Richard Leadbetter compared these two versions on same PC and came to conclusion that official version had awful frame times and a huge collapse to rates but crack version was a major improvement.

To improve PC performance, Capcom eventually launched a patch later to optimize anti-tamper technology but players remain skeptical. Now that they removed Denuvo, it remains to be seen whether that improves performance on PCs.

Resident Evil: Village ended up becoming fastest-selling game in Resident Evil series by shipping 5 million copies on all platforms. Regardless of its PC issues, Village sold over 7 million copies by January 2023 and continues to sell very well.