Empress (cracker)

Empress (sometimes stylized EMPRESS) is a video game cracker who specializes in breaking anti-piracy software. While the identity of Empress is unknown, she refers to herself as a woman and Russian. Empress has also released cracked games under the moniker C000005.

Empress is known as one of the few crackers who can crack Denuvo. Her motivation is to remove the software license aspect of digital games in an effort to preserve them after developers drop support. Empress also claims that removing digital rights management (DRM) increases performance in-game.

Career
Empress became interested in the DRM-cracking scene in 2014. Her followers can participate in polls to select which game they want cracked next, and her work is funded through crowdsourced donations. Empress uses the money to cover the living costs, upgrade hardware, and purchase games that they intend to crack. She acknowledges that accepting payment for piracy is against the etiquette of the warez scene.

Empress rose to prominence after releasing a cracked version of Red Dead Redemption 2. Other high-profile games cracked by Empress include Mortal Kombat 11 and Anno 1800. In February 2021, Empress stated that she would soon be arrested after being allegedly caught red handed working on the crack for Immortals Fenyx Rising. Empress blamed FitGirl Repacks, with whom she had a feud. However, that March, Empress was available to publish a workaround for the online check-in system of Battle.net. Empress's arrest announcement was met with general skepticism by the cracking community.

She released a cracked version of Hogwarts Legacy in February 2023.

Controversies
Empress is known around the P2P scene for the "personal note" section in the NFOs of her releases, often containing a variety of slurs and other offensive language. The information file supplied with the cracked version of Hogwarts Legacy expressed dissatisfaction with what was described as the "woke system" of today.