Addressing the RE: Revelations Chun-Li scandal - Enigma/CapcomGate
You might have seen news stories on the internet about Capcom recently patching in Enigma Protection to RE: Revelations and other games as a way to prevent modding, with many people speculating this was done as revenge after a Street Fighter 6 tournament accidentally showed a very naked Chun-Li for a few seconds.
If you want a short summary: this is pretty much a nothingburger and you might as well go back to real life and eat an actual burger.
Longer summary follows...
First of all, I need to add some context. Around August, a Street Fighter 6 tournament accidentally showed a Chun-Li nude mod briefly on screen. People thought that was silly thing that happened and went about their day.
Two months later, Capcom held an RE Engine conference with general information about the engine. One of the presentations was about anti-piracy and anti-cheating and it included a statement where Capcom stated "the majority of mods can have a positive effect on the game, some mods, however, can be detrimental to the company" and "there are a number of mods that are offensive to public order and morals" and "image of the product is tarnished and brandish is affected." They also complain that mods can result in more QA work (they don't do a very good job explaining how). When they talk about offensive mods, they're most surely talking about nude mods. They state they ultimately choose to treat cheats and mods as the same thing, which means their anti-cheat attempts can be seen as attempts to prevent modding.
It's disappointing to hear Capcom's stance on modding as I very much think the majority of mods are beneficial to their games and especially help extend their longevity. The video aligns pretty well with Capcom's actions in the past years. They've occasionally sent DMCA takedown notices against nude mods and videos showcasing nude mods. And they've added more layers of protections to their games, likely an overall attempt to make it harder to crack and cheat/mod. From a modding standpoint, these protections are annoying to deal with but they've never been major obstacles. From a cheating standpoint, I'm not sure what Capcom is doing. Their attempts to prevent cheating has been extremely lackluster.
Fast forward to the present: Capcom patched RE: Revelations some days ago but the patch wasn't in a good state. Capcom was very quick to withdraw the patch so they can address the issues. I didn't try the patch myself, but people reported worse framerate and crashes. Another user noticed the game now has Enigma Protection and that prompted people to start putting two and two together, which resulted in many people assuming that all of the problems with the patch must be related to Enigma Protection and that they added Enigma Protections as a method to prevent all mods from working due to the Chun-Li scandal convincing them mods are the work of the devil.
Here's a bunch of reasons why the above theory is nonsense:
Capcom has been adding Enigma to their games for a long while now. Resident Evil 5 got it last year. SF6 beta had it two years ago. Ghost Trick has it. And many other games have it. I have not seen people report worse performance issues in those games or major glitches as result of Enigma. We don't have a reason yet to believe that Enigma was the cause of the crashes or performance issues in the new Revelations patch.
Enigma only affects mods in a very specific way. It doesn't affect file mods at all (which most mods are -- including visual mods). It does not prevent memory from being poked with new values. The primary obstacle with Enigma related to modding is that it makes it harder to attach a debugger (which is very useful when it comes to making trainers and code-changing mods) and it prevents certain code-changing mods from loading. But it is doable to work around. Some technical details on how to get around it can be found here.
Capcom has shown some anti-mod behaviour the past years. For instance, with the various layers of protections added RE Engine games. I don't think this is specifically to target mods, but rather an overall attempt to combat piracy and cheating (and modding as extension). This is nothing new, and the effects this has had on modding is pretty small as their attempts have been relatively tame (thankfully).
Capcom has occasionally been taking down mods with nudity or Youtube videos showcasing modded nudity. I know they've been doing this since at least 2019. So, the Chun-Li scandal is not the first time Capcom has witnessed naked pixels of their video game ladies. That said, their attempts to combat these mods have been very sporadic.
There's an image that's been floating around showing Enigma triggering dozens of virus alerts on virustotal.com. That scan doesn't seem to have been made with any Capcom game EXE with Enigma. I tried scanning two games myself and the results are pretty clean. I should note that false positives with virustotal.com are, unfortunately, common, and I wouldn't be surprised if Enigma helps to generate false positive as it packs executables and obfuscates code, something that can raise alarms with a virus scanner. As a general pro tip: don't run executables from the internet unless you fully trust the source.
Some people are claiming Enigma makes it impossible to run the game on Steam Deck, but there's no evidence of that. However, you can easily see evidence showing the opposite by searching for footage of games with Enigma running on the Steam Deck, like RE5.
My personal theory is that Capcom has decided to start using Enigma as yet another layer to their games, most likely as an attempt to prevent piracy, and maybe they have a policy to add it to most of their games moving forward, even when working on patches for older games. That theory is nonsensical in the way that there's no good reason to add more DRM to a game that was cracked years ago, but hey, executives can make very silly decisions at times.
Final thoughts: We have no reason to believe Enigma was behind the problems with the Revelations patch and the vast majority of mods still work completely fine with the games that have Enigma Protection. If people want to be upset about actions Capcom has done, then I suggest being upset by this incident where Capcom sent copyright strikes against Youtube videos that were showcasing innocuous Monster Hunter Rise mods. That was messed up and I hope it's something Capcom won't start doing moving forward.
And while it was disappointing to hear that from the RE Engine conference that Capcom is officially against mods, they haven't done anything substantial to prevent them and there's no indication so far that's changing.
Edit: Some more information. I saw other modders note that Capcom will sometimes switch out Denuvo or Enigma for the other. For instance, RE4 demo had Enigma but the full version used Denuvo. Ghost Trick had Denuvo removed and then Enigma added. So it looks like Capcom are going for the plan of using Denuvo for when a game is new and then eventually switch it out for Enigma. It's also worth noting that RE4R demo was modded like crazy, despite it having Enigma.
Edit 2: I was able to download the Revelations Enigma build (instructions how to do so here) so I could test it. I can run file mods, and I can read and poke memory. I could even attach a debugger and modify code, which was the big thing I expected it to prevent. So, yeah, this implementation of Enigma does even less than I expected. It's becoming more and more baffling how this became such a big news story.
Edit 3: I'd just like to clarify I am not defending Capcom's decision to add Enigma to Revelations or other games. As I mentioned in the post, I think it's nonsensical to add DRM to older titles. I would be very happy if Capcom stopped experimenting with adding various protections to their new or old titles. The focus of my post was clarifying all of the myths around this patch, with a focus on looking at this from a modding standpoint.