Eight hundred and twenty-nine people are playing a 28-year-old game right now. It’s sitting at #10 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart. And the most-visible player reviews are begging Capcom to remove the DRM that’s breaking it.

That’s the tension at the heart of the original Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis landing on Steam this week. Capcom priced them at $4.99 each — half off the $9.99 list — and the nostalgia tax worked. RE3 hit #1 on the Specials chart and #9 on Top Sellers with 801 concurrent players. RE2 landed at #3 Specials and #10 Top Sellers with 829. Both carry “Very Positive” overall ratings.

Read past the aggregate score, though, and the picture shifts. The top-voted reviews for RE2 are negative, and they’re not grousing about dated tank controls. RE3’s top review is positive — but the second-highest raises the same DRM complaints.

“The game crashes when saving and the controller re-map options are horrific,” reads the most-upvoted RE2 review, from a player with one hour logged. Another, six minutes in: “Remove DRM from this classic ( my review will change when it’s removed from all 3 of the og games).” A third cuts straight to it: “Please remove the DRM.”

Over on RE3, the second-highest review reports that controller inputs simply don’t register. “Can’t get out of the main menu. Waste of time.”

The Enigma DRM Problem

The culprit is Enigma, an anti-piracy system Capcom has been bolting onto PC releases despite consistent, well-documented backlash. When Capcom added Enigma to Resident Evil 4 Remake in February, Digital Foundry measured CPU performance drops of roughly 20%, particularly during cutscenes on lower-end hardware. Capcom quietly stripped it back out in March, as Eurogamer reported — SteamDB entries confirmed the removal.

So having just watched Enigma blow up publicly and force a reversal, Capcom’s response was to slap it onto three games released between 1996 and 1999.

The same tidied-up versions of RE1, RE2, and RE3 have been available DRM-free on GOG for years. GOG is listed as a co-developer on the Steam pages — the platform built on a no-DRM philosophy helped modernize these classics, only for Capcom to wrap the Steam builds in the exact technology GOG exists to oppose. GOG has also committed to maintaining these games for all future PC hardware through its Preservation Program.

As Kotaku noted, the DRM is especially farcical because the GOG versions are unrestricted executables — download them, share them, email them to a friend. The piracy ship sailed decades ago. Capcom is selling a worse product to paying customers while the unrestricted version sits a browser tab away.

A Curious Advertisment for GOG

Community commenters on GamingOnLinux spotted the unintended consequence: the GOG.com developer credit on every Steam page effectively advertises a superior, DRM-free alternative. Players who discover the re-releases through Steam see the GOG branding, learn the DRM-free versions exist, and have every incentive to spend their money elsewhere. Whether that’s accidental marketing for GOG or a strange contractual artifact isn’t clear.

Community Fixes — Again

For players committed to the Steam versions, community patches are already circulating. The top RE2 review credits a user named Chedd for a fix originally built for February’s Dino Crisis re-releases — which suffered identical Enigma-related issues. The workaround reportedly gets the Resident Evil trilogy running on Linux and Steam Deck.

That third-party community patches are required to make a five-dollar game function on the dominant handheld PC platform is, charitably, a bad look. Capcom shipped RE2 and RE3 without working controller support, without Steam Deck compatibility, and with a crash-on-save bug — all to protect decades-old code from piracy the DRM doesn’t prevent.

The Real Cost

The Resident Evil franchise has moved over 183 million units lifetime as of December 2025, per Capcom’s own figures. Resident Evil Requiem surpassed 5 million sales in under a week. Capcom does not need the pennies Enigma theoretically protects.

What the company does need is the goodwill that $4.99 classic re-releases generate. And it’s burning that goodwill by shipping broken versions of games that work perfectly fine on a competing storefront — at twice the price. The cheaper option is the broken one. That’s the cost of Capcom’s DRM fixation, and players are making sure everyone reads about it in the review section.

Sources