Resident Evil, Mega Man, and Monster Hunter fans unite to oppose Capcom's new anti-mod software

A new update for Resident Evil Revelations has added some additional software intended to prevent modding, and this action has proven to be a tipping point for the community as Capcom's months-long push against mods continues.

Back in October, Capcom published a dev-focused video in which the company asserted, among other things, that mods are "no different than cheating." While the video didn't go into a specific example here, it did mention that "there are a number of mods that are offensive to public order and morals," which to many observers seemed to be a reference to that time a Street Fighter tournament accidentally featured a nude Chun-Li mod.

A month ago, Capcom started to issue takedown notices against Monster Hunter videos which featured - or even mentioned - mods. "Capcom Japan's legal team is going after Sunbreak videos on YouTube which feature any kind of mod and issue takedown requests and copyright strikes," the popular Team Darkside channel explained in a community note. "We also received a copyright strike. With three strikes your channel gets deleted. Many videos of fellow MH speedrunners were taken down, some speedrunners even received three strikes and their channels were deleted."

Somewhere in all that, Capcom began to add a piece of software called Enigma to its back catalog of games on PC. While Enigma can be used as DRM software, it doesn't appear that's the intention here (and it would be pretty useless in that function anyway since cracked versions of older games are already likely being distributed by pirates). Instead, Enigma is being used to prevent modders from affecting a game's .exe file.

It's unclear how many games Capcom has added Enigma to, but the affected titles include the Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection and the Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection. All of this went pretty much under the radar until last week, when an Enigma update landed for Resident Evil Revelations, and quickly went viral among the unsurprisingly vocal anti-DRM crowd.

I haven't found any robust testing to verify claims that Enigma can cause major performance drops, but it certainly does make modding more difficult, which seems to be the intended effect. Tensions rose even higher when some unhappy Capcom players took to Enigma's support forums to press the company on the software's implementation. A site admin responded "Maybe you are so angered because you can't use the cheats anymore?" Which, uh… you can imagine how well that's been going down. That forum exchange has since been deleted, but can still be seen on Archive.org.

The Resident Evil Revelations patch has since been removed. In a post on Steam, Capcom says 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." It's unclear what the "issue observed" is in Capcom's eyes, but the fact that the studio is already planning to re-release the patch suggests that Enigma's mod-blocking is a feature, not a bug.

In case you're interested, here are the best Monster Hunter World mods.