Almost two years after launch, Capcom finally removes Denuvo from Resident Evil Village

Capcom recently deployed a small update to Resident Evil Village's PC version that has finally removed the anti-piracy software Denuvo DRM that the game shipped with. Despite constant backlash from players, the implementation of Denuvo in video games has seen a massive surge in the past few years, with most AAA publishers usually shipping the game with this software.

The removal of the anti-piracy software wasn't communicated by Capcom, either via patch notes or social media posts, but was instead quietly deployed in the form of a small update. Shortly after the update went live, the Resident Evil Village store page on Steam was updated with the Denuvo-related notification removed.

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Capcom finally removes Denuvo from Resident Evil Village PC version

For the average player, Denuvo rarely affects the game's performance, and even if it does, it is so minuscule that one would barely notice it. However, there have been a number of cases where the implementation of Denuvo has caused massive performance and stability-related issues in a number of games.

Resident Evil Village was one such title that was affected. However, with the game's recent update, which is 38.5 megabytes in size, the anti-piracy software has finally been removed from the game's code. The removal of Denuvo wasn't mentioned in the game's patch notes but was noticed by players who saw a massive reduction in the file size of the game's executable (622 MB to 209 MB).

With the removal of Denuvo from Resident Evil Village, PC players are finally going to be able to play the game without being restricted by arbitrary code running in the background and bottlenecking the game's performance. Implementation of anti-piracy measures and DRMs has seen a massive surge in the past few years.

Despite this, games have regularly been cracked, sometimes within days of their release on PC. Resident Evil Village was among the few games where players noticed a massive performance improvement in the cracked version. Although Capcom issued a patch that somewhat helped mitigate the effects of Denuvo, it was nowhere near as stable as the pirated version.

With Denuvo now finally removed from the game, players are asking for the same to be done for the Resident Evil 4 remake's PC version, which at the time of writing this article, is still sold with Denuvo. However, it should be noted that the game does not exhibit any noticeable Denuvo-related performance issues.