Resident Evil 4 Remake has been met with overwhelmingly positive reviews across the board, but that doesn't mean the launch has gone off without a hitch. PC players over on Steam are complaining about the game's use of Denuvo DRM, saying that it's leading to performance issues on setups that should be able to handle the remake.
This is just the latest example of a game coming under fire for using the controversial DRM, which is intended to prevent or at least slow down efforts to pirate the title. True enough, that means that the remake is far from being cracked, but that only seems to be creating issues for some of the legitimate players.
"The demo worked great with the right settings, no issues whatsoever," reads one of the (admittedly few) negative reviews on Steam. "However, the full released has performance issues, caused by Denuvo, as always."
They are far from the only player experiencing this, with another saying: "Denuvo at it again, can't even launch the game, played the demo just fine but cannot play the full game."
No matter how beloved a game like Resident Evil 4 Remake is, the use of Denuvo DRM will always be controversial. So much so that many are relieved when the DRM is eventually removed, as Capcom did with Resident Evil 2 Remake. The bad news is that this came almost a year after launch, so anyone determined to play without DRM is likely to be in for a bit of a wait.
Unfortunately, it seems that Capcom didn't learn its lesson from the Resident Evil Village debacle. In this case, Denuvo DRM failed to prevent the game from being cracked and made the game perform worse for anyone who bought it legitimately. The PC port then faced heavy criticism after it was found that the pirated version actually performed better, as this didn't have the DRM. At the very least, the issues with Resident Evil 4 Remake appear to be nowhere as severe or widespread as they were with Village, so more fans are able to get the game running on launch day.