In Escalation Of Anti-Modding Crusade, Capcom Now Adding Enigma DRM To PC Catalog
Spencer Baculi
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Buckle up, players: The fight over your consumer rights is about to heat-up.
Just months after declaring war on the entire concept of video game modding, Capcom has been found to be undertaking a concerted effort to add a new form of digital rights management software to their back catalog of PC titles.
This attempt by the Street Fighter series developer to restrict the way in which customers could interact with their purchased products was first brought to public attention by way of a surprise January 5th update made to Steam copies of 2013’s Resident Evil Revelations.
Perplexed as to why the eleven year-old title had suddenly received this unannounced patch, users soon took to parsing its contents for any information as to its reason for being.
Soon thereafter, as documented on the game’s official Steam community forum, players discovered that while it did provide a fix for a previous functionality issue regarding Revelations‘ ‘Jill’s Samurai Edge’ weapon DLC, this minor quality-of-life update was little more than a Trojan horse for the Enigma Protector – described by its website as a tool with which companies can use to protect their program run files “from illegal copying, hacking, modification, and analysis” – to be added to the game.
Making matters worse for Capcom was the fact that, like many such shadow installations of DRM software, more than just clamping down on consumer rights, the introduction of Enigma into Revelations‘ inner-workings also produced a stability issues within the game itself including frame rate drops, random crashes, and broken graphical options.
Faced with significant and understandable backlash to their deception, Capcom eventually reversed course on their decision, announcing on January 9th that “due to an issue observed with the latest update released, we have reverted the corresponding update.”
“We apologize for the inconvenience caused, and once the issue is resolved, we will re-release the update,” they added. “Thank you very much for your patience and cooperation.”
However, though Revelations managed to wrestle a temporarily stay of ‘death by Enigma’ from the hands of Capcom, it was soon discovered that it was far from the first of the developer’s Steam titles to have received this treatment since initially being released to the digital retail platform.
As evidenced by user reports and the direct notation in each games’ respective patch notes of recent modifications made to their executable files, affected releases – all of which have yet to have the DRM removed – include Capcom Arcade Stadium, Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium, both volumes of the Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection, the Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection, Resident Evil 5, Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, and Strider (2014).
Notably, this development comes just a little under six months after Capcom publicly revealed their disdain for the practice of modding.
Speaking on the topic during the developer’s October 2023 Capcom Open Conference Professional RE:2023, company programmer Taro Yahagi revealed that, as far as his employer was concerned, “all mods are defined as cheats, except when they are officially supported,” and thus “What [modders] are doing internally is no different than cheating.”
Elaborating on this declaration, Yahagi explained, “Mods are popular with users because they allow them to add or change various features to an existing game. However, for the purposes of anti-cheat and anti-piracy, all mods are defined as cheats. That is to say that mods that are not officially supported by the game, are impossible to distinguish from cheat tools, implementation-wise.”
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“The majority of mods can have a positive impact on the game,” he told attendees, “Some mods, however, can be detrimental to the company. Both in terms of reputational damage and in terms of workload.”
To this end, the Capcom employee then went on to detail, “There are a number of mods that are offensive to public order and morals. When these are disseminated, the image of the product is tarnished and branding is affected. Also, these offensive mods may be mistaken for legitimate implementations, and can cause reputational damage.”
“Some malicious mods can also destroy the game by cheating,” Yahagi added. “In the worst case, they can cause freezes and corrupt save data. If you have a mod that destroys your data and you contact our customer support, they will have a difficult time investigating the issue and will spend a lot of time working on it. As the customer support load increases, it will eventually circle back around and affect development costs.”
Drawing his thoughts on the topic of mods to a close, the programmer ultimately concluded, “If the development costs are affected, the quality of the game will decline. This will lead to a drop in sales and loss of revenue, as well as disappointment among users. This is not a situation anyone wants to be in. In other words, anti-cheat and anti-piracy measures are very important to protect the company’s future profits and reputation.”
NEXT: Capcom Begins Cracking Down On “Inappropriate or Objectionable” Fan Content
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