Usually, updates for premium priced ports on mobile are good to have for optimization or compatibility reasons, but Capcom’s newest update pushed out an hour ago for Resident Evil 7 biohazard (Free), Resident Evil 4 Remake (Free), and Resident Evil Village (Free) on iOS and iPadOS adds an online DRM that checks purchase history when you launch the games. This checks to see if you own the game or DLC and then proceeds to the title screen. If you click no, the game will close. If you’re connected to the internet, this takes a few seconds before you can get back to your save, but you cannot boot up any of these three games and play it offline. You will need to be online for the purchase check on launching the game. This is unfortunate, and frankly is awful because the games are all now worse off with online DRM as opposed to being playable and launchable offline before.
I tested this with all three games before updating them and verified that they did launch and work offline as of the update prior to today. With today’s update, you see the alert above or a similar one and clicking no closes the game. If this doesn’t matter to you, that’s fine, but I’m not a fan of online DRM like this being patched into a game people have already paid for before. Hopefully Capcom can find a better solution for checking purchases or do it once in a while and not on every launch. Stuff like this makes it harder to recommend Capcom’s premium priced ports. If you’ve not gotten the games yet, they are free to try, and you can grab Resident Evil 7 biohazard on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, here. Check out Resident Evil 4 Remake here on the App Store and Resident Evil Village here. Read my reviews of them here, here, and here. Do you own the three modern Resident Evil games on iOS and what do you think of this update for all three?