Capcom Appears To Break Monster Hunter For The Steam Deck After DRM Swap
from the ready-fire-aim dept
Here we go again. In the long and vaunted history of DRM in software, and especially in video games, there is one general truism: DRM tends to effect only legitimate buyers while so-called “pirates” route around it completely. There are all kinds of anecdotal stories as to the annoyances at best, and game-crippling outcomes at worst, that are said to be caused by DRM that either shipped with the game or, more annoyingly, were added after the game was bought. The DRM companies typically will tell you that any performance issues experienced with these games can’t possibly have anything to do with their DRM, a claim that flies in the face of thousands and thousands of instances of witness testimony on social media and the wider internet, while also stating that any inconveniences legit buyers experience due to DRM mishaps are outweighed by all the piracy the DRM kinda-maybe stopped for a while, possibly.
Capcom has a bunch of titles out there that were bought many years ago that paying customers still play. And that’s great! Less great is that the company appears to keep updating these older titles with new DRM which breaks those games to one degree or another. For instance, I can’t explain why Capcom decided to update Resident Evil Revelations earlier this month with Enigma Protector DRM, given that the game came out over a decade ago. Speculation appears to be that it might have something to do with protecting the game from cheat software, which is how Capcom refers to game mods generally. But doing so broke the game so badly that on January 13th, Capcom rolled the update back entirely after an enormous amount of backlash.
Due to an issue observed with the latest update released, we have reverted the corresponding update. We apologise for the inconvenience caused, and once the issue is resolved, we will re-release the update. Thank you very much for your patience and cooperation.
-CAPCOM
Well, Capcom must have thought it had everything ironed out, because it then turned its sights on Monster Hunter Rise, a game that was released 3 or so years ago. That game originally shipped with Denuvo DRM, which, well, R.I.P. On January 22nd, just shy of ten whole days from when it rolled back Enigma from Resident Evil Revelations, the company updated Monster Hunter Rise by removing Denuvo and replacing it with Enigma.
Which appears to have broken the game for the Steam Deck handheld console for some sizable chunk of players.
Monster Hunter Rise no longer works on Steam Deck hardware, after its latest update added new DRM software. The game previously used Denuvo anti-tamper technology, but the latest version 16.0.2.0 update reportedly removes it and, as noted by modder FluffyQuack, replaces it with the controversial Enigma Protector DRM.
The game’s Steam page has been hit with a number of negative reviews, with its usual ‘Very Positive’ review summary reduced to ‘Mixed’. Many of these reviews note that the game will now no longer run on Steam Deck, with players blaming the addition of Enigma (though there’s no definitive proof this is the exact reason, as opposed to another issue with the same update).
On the one hand, it’s true that it can’t be stated with 100% certainty that Enigma is what broke the game for the Steam Deck. This is mostly true with every other historical complaint about DRM fucking up an otherwise working game. It goes this way every single time. And part of the reason this claim is allowed to fester has to do with the opaque nature of the patch announcement. Here is literally everything in the patch notes announced for the Steam version of the game for this update.
How could that be any more clear?
The overall point here is quite simple: pissing customers off twice now with updates including new DRM software over some misguided anxiety about game mods is beyond silly. Two games, two times being broken, and the common denominator looks to be Enigma. How is any of this worth the trouble?
Filed Under: drm, enigma protector, monster hunter rise, resident evil revelations, steam deck
Companies: capcom
Comments on “Capcom Appears To Break Monster Hunter For The Steam Deck After DRM Swap”
They’ve apparently added Enigma to a bunch of older titles, including collections of decades-old single-player games like Mega Man Legacy Collection.
Steam doesn’t seem to mark Enigma as a third-party DRM like it does for Denuvo. They really should do something about that.
Re: Modders can't make us look bad, that's our job!
Gotta love the justification they’re using, apparently no-one pointed out the obvious problem with how they’ve decided to address the ‘problem’…
In October, the developers of Capcom’s RE Engine, the game software that powers games like Street Fighter 6, Monster Hunter Rise, and multiple Resident Evil games, said that mods can cause “reputational damage” and become a burden on customer support.
… because apparently reputational damage caused by the company bricking their own games or causing notable performance degradation isn’t something they considered.
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Because it’s always less disgusting to clean your own mess than from the others.
It also seems that Capcom is developing games for Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, and doesn’t even really put much though about this “Stream Deck” out of nowhere. “Linux? Proton? Don’t know. Not interested.”
Re: Re:
Capcom’s been on a tear about this ever since that competition where the host forgot to disable his nude Chun-Li mod. Because if you’re going to see Chun-Li’s titties, by God it had damn-well better be in official, Capcom-licensed media.
I think part of it is a cultural thing; I think Japanese developers are more likely to take offense at the very idea of players playing their games in an unapproved way than western ones are. (I remember Capcom complaining about Game Genie back in the SNES days.)
It’s still pretty weird that they’re bothering with stuff like Mega Man Legacy Collection. Is there even a mod scene for that? I would think that all the modding around the old Mega Man games would be focused on the original ROMs, not the PC collections.
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It’s still pretty weird that they’re bothering with stuff like Mega Man Legacy Collection. Is there even a mod scene for that? I would think that all the modding around the old Mega Man games would be focused on the original ROMs, not the PC collections.
If there wasn’t before after throwing down the gauntlet like this by backhanding their customers I wouldn’t be surprised if that changed just to spite the company.
Oh good, I can break out this copypasta once more.
DRM (initialism for “Digital Rights Management”) — noun — closed-source “black box” spyware that acts as the digital equivalent of an ankle bracelet tracking device for paying customers but does nothing to prevent copyright infringement carried out by non-paying customers; colloquially known as “Digital Restrictions Management”; a stupid fucking idea
Re:
“DRM (initialism for “Digital Rights Management”)…”
You know, I’m pretty sure that’s not how you spell the word ‘restrictions’.
Re: Re: Grammar
“DRM tends to effect only ” should be:
“DRM tends to AFFECT only”
Re: Re: Re:
Why are you saying that to me? I don’t lack context-spelling ability (unlike closed captioners).
Re: Re: Re:
I came here to say that 😀 I’m not a grammar communist but it triggers my autism.
Re: Re: Re:
While I commend the effort, it’s a bit odd to direct the spelling remark to someone explicitly stating it’s a copypasta.
(I presumed you meant to the root comment of this thread)
Re: Re: Re:2
I don’t even use “affect” or “effect” in the copypasta.
Re: Re:
Ninja’d.
Also, I would have flagged this as “Funny”, except that since it’s effectively the actual truth, it turns out it’s never actually amusing at all.
Assuming it’s not a case of ‘Exec A had a brilliant idea and no-one is willing to put their job on the line by telling them it’s screwing everything up’ I can only assume that someone in the company recently got offered a nice kickback from the company pushing this particular bit of malware, as I struggle to think of why else they’d suddenly decide to sabotage several of their older games like that, all the more so after it’s demonstrated that it can and will brick or at least noticeably degrade those games.
It could be something even dumber
Sadly it could be just stupidity and blindly following policy:
Our licenses for DRM1 are starting to expire and they want a 20% hike for a renewal, what do we do? It is company policy to have DRM on eveything!
Who is cheaper?
DRM2 is 2.9837568% cheaper than what DRM1 is asking for.
Roll out DRM2.
But we haven’t tested it for compatibility.
That’s your mistake for not raising the issue in time, roll out DRM2. We can’t have a gap in our patented Protect Shareholder Value program.
Re:
… you know what, you’re right, I might have been giving them way too much credit and expecting the decision to have been given any real consideration at all beyond just ‘what’s cheaper for us right now?’
Re: Re:
But at the risk of stating the obvious, the cheapest option would be not adding new DRM to games that have already been out for years.
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While true, let’s not forget the delusions of lost sales from a unknown size (but presumed massive) fleet of pirates.
You should do more research, its not DRM preventing play but some other bug
This is actually incorrect, and Valve fixed it basically the day of with a patch to Proton. While it wasnt a proton specific issue, it wasn’t like the DRM was preventing play either.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/5495#issuecomment-1904580053
Here’s a link to the announcement of a published fix. I myself made use of it.
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And what exactly has Proton to do with Enigma Protector? Free clue: read moar.
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MHR is a Windows game and the article is about it failing to work on Linux/Steamdeck, which means proton is involved. Especially since a patch to Proton enabled the game to work with the new DRM scheme.
You might want to take your own advice to read more.
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That isn’t an announcement. Thats a comment at the bottom of an unrelated years long seemingly unreleated combatibility report. Im never going to naturally find that ‘announcement’, as I wouldn’t be looking that deep at into the unsolved compatibility report from 2022.
As well, I think you’ve unreasonably dismissed the criticism here. They changed the DRM, and the change appears to have introduced incompatibility with the steam deck. That’s the criticism, and it doesn’t matter it wasn’t the DRM shutting down play, what matters is the new DRM broke the proton compatibility layer, and Capcom did not test to determine if the DRM change had an impact on unmodded use prior to release, after their last DRM rollout bricked RER so had they had to rollback.
Steam discovering a fix in proton doesn’t address Capcom’s laissez faire attitude to major system updates.
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The problem is I’ve had numerous patches randomly break steamdeck compat over the years for many games from many publishers.
Even if its specifically the DRM part of the patch that caused the problem vs something else, it wasnt intentional, they never banned anyone for online play that got around it, and they reverted the patch to put out a fix later on.
This is entirely normal to experience as a player on Linux/steamdeck and is more about devs refusing to test on these platforms vs something about the evils of DRM, as evil as they are.
As for the rest… If you looked around youd realize Valve forces all proton issues for a specific game into a specific thread and then keeps it open forever, such that as new issues appear over the years they all get consolidated into one mega-issue for the game. I found this particular issue on GH by going through one of the specific opened issues caused by the patch, where the valve team closed that issue and redirected it to the one I linked.
Feel free to dismiss everything I said, but it really isnt about the DRM here… It’s bad patching and testing practises, which is nothing new.
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and? Nobody was arguing they broke steamdeck compatibility on purpose.
Either way, an unnecessary patch to add DRM to the game broke it for a platform it was previously able to run on. It dosen’t matter if it wasn’t the DRM itself or another part of the patch code. The DRM is still arguably has some level of blame, or else the patch wouldn’t exist.
Poor QA (or lack of QA) dosen’t excuse the problem. If anything it makes the problem worse and shows a lack of care.
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You should do some research. Like just making it to the end of the article, even.
DRM: the validation sticker for unreasonable fear
So, we have monsters in space now?
I’m clearly getting old. I read Capcom, saw monsters, hunting and wondered how on earth, or rather in space, NASA was related to that and had applied Digital Rights Management to a public resource.
It does help if you were introduced to the role of Capcom during many of the Space Shuttle launches.
Too young for Apollo and moon landings, too old for a Japanese gaming company 🙂
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Capcom, short for ‘capsule communicator’. Not a problem for a gaming company to use it as a name, even if the original was trademarkable (which US Government works are not). Born long after the space race, but there’s much that one can research online.
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i’d buy that script. Let’s get it into production!
P.S. Capcom the gaming company if pretty old. 😉
Why should they care?
They got their money from their customers aka lowlife shitty peasants.
For real though. Isn’t it interesting how the consumer license and use of a product is always temporary, but the payment for it is permanent outside of short term consumer protection laws.
And I’m not sure that ‘management’ is how the word ‘malware’ is spelled, either.
Legal challenge
I wonder if there is a way to legally challenge editors who add a DRM after purchase. The buyer didn’t know about DRM and might have bought the game specifically on the basis that there wasn’t one (other than the default Steam one). If this renders the game unplayable, there might be ground to sue.
Who am I kidding? Their EULA probably has a line saying “we have the right to update the game at anytime, and we’re not responsible if this breaks your copy of the game. Even when it’s intentional and malicious. Because f— you, paying customers.”