Empress (cracker)

Background

Empress, sometimes stylized as EMPRESS, is a pseudonymous video game cracker whose real identity remains unknown. She refers to herself as a young Russian woman. In addition to releasing work under the Empress handle, she has also published cracked games under the moniker C000005.

Career

Empress became interested in the DRM-cracking scene in 2014. She developed a reputation as one of a small number of crackers capable of defeating Denuvo, a widely used anti-tamper technology that had resisted many other attempts to circumvent it. Her stated motivations center on software preservation — specifically, removing license-enforcement mechanisms from games whose developers have dropped support — as well as the claim that stripping DRM improves in-game performance.

Her operation was funded through crowdsourced donations, with Empress typically requesting $500 to crack a specific game. Followers could participate in polls to vote on which title she would target next. The funds were used to cover living costs, hardware upgrades, and the purchase of games she intended to crack.

Notable Work

Empress rose to wider prominence after releasing a cracked version of Red Dead Redemption 2. Other high-profile releases attributed to her include Mortal Kombat 11 and Anno 1800. In February 2023, she released a cracked version of Hogwarts Legacy just twelve days after the game's official launch.

In February 2021, Empress publicly stated that she expected to be arrested imminently, claiming she had been caught working on a crack for Immortals Fenyx Rising. She attributed the situation to FitGirl Repacks, a separate figure in the piracy scene with whom she had an ongoing feud. The announcement was met with widespread skepticism within the cracking community. The following month, in March 2021, Empress published a workaround for the online check-in system used by Battle.net.

Controversies

Empress is noted within the peer-to-peer scene for including lengthy, opinionated commentary in the NFO files accompanying her releases. The information file distributed with her Hogwarts Legacy crack, for example, contained remarks expressing dissatisfaction with what she described as the "woke system," and included a defense of Harry Potter series creator J.K. Rowling's views on transgender people. Her NFO notes have been characterized as "extremely opinionated" by observers in the scene.

Retirement

In late 2025, Empress announced her retirement from cracking Denuvo-protected games. A statement titled End of an Era – EMPRESS circulated among her followers, citing ongoing health problems and a loss of motivation toward the piracy scene as the primary reasons for her decision to step back.