A few days ago, a rather large case began on the Internet regarding the anti-burglary product Enigma. It all started with a patch for Resident Evil: Revelations, the more than 10-year-old spin-off of the famous survival horror series, which was originally released on Nintendo 3DS, but later on other platforms, including PC. The patch was for the Steam version, it was mainly intended to fix certain bugs, but at the same time caused some of them. Players began reporting framerate drops or stuttering, and Capcom quickly removed the patch, saying it was buggy and would be released again on an unspecified date.
However, the matter was far from over, as players soon learned that the patch had added the aforementioned Enigma to the game. And the crowd began to panic. Twitter account PC_Focus shared a screenshot saying that Enigma is malware that has not yet been confirmed and is most likely a “false positive” test result.
Mostly, apparently, this was not a screenshot test of a file from a Capcom game at all. As threat intelligence researcher Azaka Sekai noted in his video, the test file is not signed by Capcom and has nothing to do with it at all. The test has already been conducted in August 2022 and the file only contains a demo license of Enigma.
so I guess we’re spreading fake news now, yeah
ok let’s debunk this quickly https://t.co/0YUwdWFmsJ
a) The executable shown in the image is not even owned by Capcom – all Capcom games are signed and this one doesn’t have or even contain Capcom anywhere in the executable.— 安坂星海 Azaka Sekai (@AzakaSekai_) January 12, 2024
In addition, players began reporting that Capcom had added Enigma to other games (and that they no longer worked on the Steam Deck), and of course, there was review bombing of Revelations and other titles. How did all this even happen?
It must be said that Enigma should be software that influences the creation of modifications. The fact that Capcom’s attitude towards them is not entirely positive is not entirely news; a few months ago this topic was discussed at one of the conferences dedicated to RE Engin. Among other things, the developer speaker said that while some mods may be useful, others are offensive or may otherwise harm the game.
Therefore, he essentially said that in addition to protecting against piracy and cheats, we also need to address protection against mods. An incident from last year’s Street Fighter 6 tournament in which one of the players forgot to turn off nude mode is often cited as the reason. However, the history goes back much further.
And that’s the problem. While in many places you may find that Enigma is a new thing that Capcom is now trying to implement into new and old games, it has actually been around for a while, it just hasn’t been addressed yet. Capcom uses it at least from March 2023, and Enigma has already been added to games such as Resident Evil 5 and 6, Capcom Arcade Stadium or even Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective.
I especially emphasize that Enigma appeared not now, but earlier. This is important because many people on the internet are now claiming (like this post on the Steam Deck subreddit with over 6k votes) that the games mentioned (and others) are suddenly not working on Steam Deck, or at least not launching . worst. The truth is that this information is backed up by absolutely nothing. For this purpose, I personally installed Ghost Trick on my Steam Deck OLED and the game runs perfectly without any problems.
A well-known game mod from Capcom under the nickname FluffyQuack also commented on this case. According to him, Enigma is not even entirely effective in preventing modifications. This doesn’t prevent file access (and visual modifications should work the same as without Enigma), but it just makes it harder to use the debugger or it may be harder for moderators to make certain changes to the code. Azaka Sekai then argues that Enigma is not even DRM, as they write everywhere, but just an anti-tamper solution using virtualization, similar to the relatively popular VMProtect, which is widely used, for example, by Ubisoft. By the way, it also comes from Russia (this was another argument against the Enigma software).
There is a lot of misinformation out there, so I’ll quickly summarize what I know:
Revelations had a very glitchy patch that Capcom very quickly rolled back so it could be reworked. There is no indication that other Capcom games will receive a similar patch.
… https://t.co/Uvs1W7dR11— FluffyQuack (@Fluffyquack) January 12, 2024
In general, according to FluffyQuack, it can be said that Capcom plans to first introduce Denuvo for new games, and then replace it with Enigma, as happened, for example, with the already mentioned Ghost Trick. But in the RE4 remake it was the other way around. The full version used Denuvo, and the demo version used Enigma. And despite this, the modifications worked for him. By the way, FluffyQuack a few hours ago found a way to get to the version of Resident Evil: Revelations using Enigma and make sure that the modifications already work without problems.
As for the alleged performance issues, it’s too early to judge, but we can’t say that Enigma is a clear culprit. As mentioned here, it was added to several Capcom games last year and no one reported similar issues. Therefore, I would venture to say that any problems with Revelations could be associated with something else entirely, but it is, of course, impossible to completely rule out that Enigma was the cause.
I was able to download the Revelations patch with Enigma implemented. File mods work, reading and poking memory works. I could even attach a debugger, set breakpoints and change the code, although I expected it to be blocked.
Sat, yes, very good burger
— FluffyQuack (@Fluffyquack) January 15, 2024
Anyway, I’d like to end this article with how easy it is to spread misinformation (and I use the prefix “mis” intentionally because I have absolutely no evidence that this was intentional). I’ll leave my opinion on DRM or anti-hacking products to everyone, because it’s clear to me that this is a controversial topic. In any case, this is no reason to invent completely non-existent problems, such as the inability to play Capcom games on the Steam Deck, which has led some players to believe that they will never buy Capcom titles again. Based on false information…
It’s incredible to me how quickly Enigma has become such a huge deal, despite the minimal amount of information we have. It is a pity that writing a sensational story always attracts more attention, no matter what it is based on, and only a minimum of people manage to debunk it. Therefore, I would like to encourage all readers to simply check the information and not believe something just because it matches your opinion, in this case about DRM. I hope we learn from this incident and it won’t happen again next time. This is a lesson for all of us.
Source :Indian TV
