Monster Hunter Rise, the sixth mainline entry in Capcom’s creature-slaying action RPG, is now broken on Steam Deck. It seems that, right after the company replaced its old digital rights management (DRM) software with a new one, the game just wouldn’t boot up anymore. That sucks, but Capcom is investigating the issue.
DRM is quite controversial within the PC gaming space. Basically, it’s used to stamp out piracy and other illegal means of getting your hands on copyrighted works. In practice, though, DRM tends to counterattack whatever software a game runs on like positive and negative charges repelling each other. This is what happened with Resident Evil Revelations, as Capcom recently added DRM to the 2012 game which reportedly caused tons of performance issues, prompting the studio to immediately roll that back as the game was review bombed.
Now, the same thing has happened to Monster Hunter Rise. In a Steam update that dropped on January 22, Capcom said that “some system data will be updated.” While the company didn’t clarify what this meant, VGC reported (via modder FluffyQuack) that the company replaced Monster Hunter Rise’s Denuvo DRM tech with Enigma Protector DRM, the same software that broke Revelations.
As X/Twitter user _flowerworks_ demonstrates in the above video, Monster Hunter Rise just doesn’t start on Steam Deck anymore. Other folks in the official subreddit have also posted about the game being unplayable now that Capcom has replaced Denuvo with Enigma Protector.
Capcom is aware that Monster Hunter Rise is broken now, posting on the game’s Steam store page that the development team is “investigating” the issue.
“There have been reports of the game not running on Steam Deck after updating to Ver.16.0.2.0,” Capcom said. “The team is currently investigating this issue. We will let you know as soon as we find out more, so please hold on for further information.”
Kotaku reached out to Capcom for comment.
This is a bummer, but it shouldn’t be too surprising. In October 2023, Capcom said during an R&D presentation that game mods are the same as cheating. Since DRM doesn’t just curb illegal acquisition but also game tampering, and given that mods mess with a game’s files, of course the company would do whatever it can to stop folks from tinkering with Capcom games by any means necessary. That doesn’t make it OK, especially if the software breaks a game.
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