One of the most peculiar internet figures of all time
March 13, 2023 7:26 PM   Subscribe

The rise of EMPRESS - How one woman turned the pirate underworld on its head, waged a solo war against the entire game industry (and won), went mad with power, started a messianic cult based on high school-level philosophy, and faked her own arrest to spite her rivals and haters
posted by buffy12 (44 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Surely not our Empress...
posted by MtDewd at 7:38 PM on March 13, 2023 [5 favorites]


“Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s” is also what my face was doing the entire read.
posted by brook horse at 8:03 PM on March 13, 2023 [2 favorites]


/r/HobbyDrama .... does what it says on the tin.
posted by tclark at 8:22 PM on March 13, 2023 [8 favorites]


But we all know what happened to Robbespierre.

He wound up on Assassin's Creed: Unity as a de Sade simulacrum which the Empress probably cracked.
posted by clavdivs at 8:30 PM on March 13, 2023 [6 favorites]


I wish I was smart enough to understand this post.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:43 PM on March 13, 2023 [11 favorites]


While reading this I kept seeing something like an old episode of say The Mod Squad, with some of those klunky written by squares hippy characters and their off kilter hep cat lingo. This tale seems like the authentic source material that would get squared up and deracinated to manufacture something for mass consumption.
posted by Pembquist at 9:05 PM on March 13, 2023


If anyone wants to learn more about the warez/piracy scene and how it all works, this excellent book is a good place to start. (Free download!)
posted by signsofrain at 9:11 PM on March 13, 2023 [4 favorites]


I don't pirate (or, usually, play) commercial computer games, but I was vaguely aware of Empress. I can see now how she kicked up enough dust to cross the edges of my periphery.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:19 PM on March 13, 2023 [1 favorite]


I wish I was smart enough to understand this post.

tl;dr

1. For ages there's been an arms race of game publishers vs. people cracking copy protection ("warez" groups)
.
2. 2014: new copy protection tech called Denuvo comes out. It's much tougher to crack than previous protective tech and basically grinds the global Scene of warez group to a halt.

3. Starting in 2017, a female cracker going by EMPRESS rose to prominence in the Scene because she was able to reliably crack Denuvo

4. She's unlike other warez groups/individuals because she holds court on reddit espousing her bizarre philosophy and soliciting donations

5. This plus her increasingly grandiose and megalomaniacal behavior angers many people in both the warez and piracy scenes.

6. February 2021: EMPRESS posts an obviously fake message that's she's being arrested due to her haters, then two days later says it was just a routine police check.

7. After her "release", she makes posts promising that the experience has changed her and wants to turn over a new leaf of kindness towards all. People think it's all very strange but are accepting.

8. That didn't last, EMPRESS resumed her bizarre ranting, now including racist screeds against Indians

It should be noted that the linked post is from 2021.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:43 PM on March 13, 2023 [44 favorites]


Some of the recent events:

9. She cracked Hogwarts Legacy, and included a transphobic rant in her release notes.

10. She was banned off Reddit, so is now on Telegram, where she has a private cult you have to pay 10,000 dollars in order to join. She let some people join for free, but she ended up kicking out half of them.
posted by buffy12 at 9:52 PM on March 13, 2023 [29 favorites]


That helped SO MUCH, thank you. I was lost originally once it got to Denuvo.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:45 PM on March 13, 2023 [1 favorite]


Why do so many people turn out to be transphobes? I just don't get it
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:45 AM on March 14, 2023 [11 favorites]



Why do so many people turn out to be transphobes?

The tsunami of profitable hate memes across many platforms is I assume the biggest catalyst.
posted by CynicalKnight at 3:39 AM on March 14, 2023 [3 favorites]


Surely not our Empress...

I'm not a transphobe and I don't game, so no.

(I am instead starting a campaign against a college newspaper with a graphics editor who used one of my artist friend's drawings in an article, and took the credit herself. Grr.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:53 AM on March 14, 2023 [15 favorites]


OMG new warez scene drama. It has been so long. I have fond memories of reading NFO files of them all dissing on each other in the early '90s, it was all so mysterious and it came with banging cracktros and ANSI art. I guess it's not surprising that it's just people flouncing on Reddit now, but it's a shame somehow.
posted by automatronic at 3:58 AM on March 14, 2023 [10 favorites]


MetaFilter: soup opera
posted by chavenet at 4:06 AM on March 14, 2023 [4 favorites]


She was banned off Reddit, so is now on Telegram, where she has a private cult you have to pay 10,000 dollars in order to join. She let some people join for free, but she ended up kicking out half of them.

well that surely is a rational thing to do to avoid paying $60 for a AAA game
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:42 AM on March 14, 2023 [10 favorites]


buffy12, has anyone else cracked Denuvo since that 2021 post? Is she still the only person in the world who can do it even after 6 years?
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:50 AM on March 14, 2023


The history of game media was oddly ahistorical, entirely skipping over floppy disks.
posted by grumpybear69 at 5:59 AM on March 14, 2023 [5 favorites]


> The history of game media was oddly ahistorical, entirely skipping over floppy disks.

Written by some kid old enough to remember CDs, and to have heard about cassette tapes and game carts, without ever actually seeing one. PCs old enough to have a floppy drive? Fuggedaboudid.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:29 AM on March 14, 2023 [4 favorites]


I worked in disc manufacturing when Denuvo came out; one of our customers, Electronic Arts, was a big user of it. Whatever it was doing to code, it screwed up a bunch of our testing and made it more difficult to be sure we were producing playable discs.
posted by achrise at 6:52 AM on March 14, 2023 [6 favorites]


I really need to do a /r/HobbyDrama mega post — it's basically a firehose of Mefi-ready content. Random examples plucked by sorting by top: posted by nathan_teske at 7:23 AM on March 14, 2023 [28 favorites]


If you Google the list of Denuvo games that have or have not been cracked, there are at least four other groups besides EMPRESS that have cracked recent games.

But Denuvo is still doing very well in this arms race. 2012 me would be shocked at how long games go without being cracked these days. 2023 me doesn't care because it's been decades since I owned hardware that was the same generation necessary to play new AAA games. By the time my hardware catches up, they are so cheap on Steam I'm not really even tempted to pirate them.
posted by straight at 7:33 AM on March 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


I never feel bad about using Scene cracks to install a game I legally own but don't want to dig out the discs for, but I'm a little less sure of the ethics of getting a game for free from Epic then installing the cracked Steam version in order to use mods that don't work with the Epic version.

That's the real tragedy of Denuvo—how much it hamstrings the development of mods.
posted by straight at 7:47 AM on March 14, 2023


I legally own but don't want to dig out the discs for

I have to credit EA for honoring old license keys. I entered my SimCity 4 and SimCity Societies licenses from old my Windows CD-ROMs into Origin and it honored them, allowing me to download modern Windows 10 versions for no additional charge. The old CDs no longer work on anything past Windows Vista because the installers will not load properly.
posted by Servo5678 at 8:03 AM on March 14, 2023 [4 favorites]


Wasn't it $5 for 10 games etc, endless discounts that killed the "scene" rather than Denuvo. You can get every single game pirated right now, so it clearly is not a technical issue.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 8:08 AM on March 14, 2023


The incredibly long writeups of World of Warcraft at /r/HobbyDrama are also good, if you've got an afternoon to kill.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:27 AM on March 14, 2023


this is like a soup opera i fucking love it

Now I want a soup opera
posted by nubs at 8:35 AM on March 14, 2023 [6 favorites]


You can get every single game pirated right now, so it clearly is not a technical issue.

That is what I assumed, that this would always be true. It is not. Here's a list of games that haven't been cracked yet. Like that big Marvel Midnight Suns stragegy game from the XCOM people—released back in December and still not cracked.
posted by straight at 8:44 AM on March 14, 2023


nathan_teske, I recommend posting them one at a time so we can give them the attention they deserve.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:49 AM on March 14, 2023


Nancy Lebovitz, we'll be here for a couple years then!
posted by nathan_teske at 9:20 AM on March 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


I really need to do a /r/HobbyDrama mega post — it's basically a firehose of Mefi-ready content.

You don't need to include the one about Scott Adams - if you look at that Reddit post, you'll see that it talks about stuff Adams did on Metafilter itself. I think we're all kind of sick of the dude.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:31 AM on March 14, 2023 [5 favorites]


Truly love the bit where she says "and if you are desperate for me to crack one specific game, just give me $500 and it's done" because yes, that is way less than the cost of buying the game.

I mean crowdsourcing the $500 is one thing, but seriously.
posted by caution live frogs at 9:46 AM on March 14, 2023


Why? She's right.

My...uh...friend has pirated countless media since the 90s and I've never understood the moralizing bullshit and idiot justifications surrounding it. You're getting stuff for free. Someone else is laboring to provide that stuff. Cracking this Denuvo thingseems really damn hard, so everyone benefitting from her work should be on their hands and knees thanking her.

If she asks people to toss her a buck so she can live and focus on cracking, then just do it. Don't like it? Then quit whining and crack it yourself or just buy the damn game. Beggars can't be choosers.

This person quoted at the end is 100% right:
Yeah the amount of fuck I give about this is so small that it doesn't even register on a scale. All I care about is free games. I would suck Satan's dick if he was the one cracking denuvo js..
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:53 AM on March 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


Why do so many people turn out to be transphobes?

Many humans don't like anyone who's different from them. I could make a long list, but let's not.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:02 AM on March 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


It presumably costs less to crack AAA games, even when this is made difficult, than to develop them, so crowdfunding cracking can make economic (if not moral) sense. But inherently a lot of the “market” is people who don’t want to pay for games or can’t, so a lot of people doing it have to be motivated by something else. Which is how you get weird stuff like this.
posted by atoxyl at 10:36 AM on March 14, 2023 [1 favorite]


From the Scott Adams Hobby Drama: "He also created the Dilberito, a failed Dilbert-themed health food product which lost him millions of dollars and was apparently bad enough for its failure to be reported in the New York Times. Adams himself said that "the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail". This one isn't really important context for understanding anything, it's just hilarious."

Just had to mention that because well, hilarious.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:58 AM on March 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


But inherently a lot of the “market” is people who don’t want to pay for games or can’t, so a lot of people doing it have to be motivated by something else. Which is how you get weird stuff like this.

That's kinda the core of it, IMO. Gabe Newell's point about piracy is relevant, here. Piracy took a nosedive when the Steam marketplace came along, because the vast majority of piracy was driven by needless barriers to purchase.

It seemed for a while that the non-games media companies learned this lesson for a while, and then forgot it, and now want to stovepipe their content to extract maximum rents from consumers, and guess what? The Pirate Bay and similar sites are getting more traction again, and there are more and more seeders on the various torrent trackers.

In games, this refragmentation has been at least partly resisted, and so the warez subculture has been mostly reduced to the hard core of people who either pirate on principle or crack DRM for the fun of it rather than frustrated customers discovering piracy is easier than buying legit.
posted by tclark at 1:06 PM on March 14, 2023 [3 favorites]


It’s the economics of it that’s key, yeah. Pirating games might be about high principle for some but mostly it’s a demand/price curve

But more importantly, w/r/t economic factors, it amazes me that this person obviously has extraordinary talents and self-discipline, and a deep industry knowledge, and uses them *for this*. It’s a squandering of human potential so mind boggling it’s very nearly admirable. Nearly.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 2:20 PM on March 14, 2023 [1 favorite]


I wanted to add that I very much agree with Emperess' stated mission of keeping games preservable. I generally don't pirate software, but it's important to the history of the medium that games and other software not be dependant on external servers to run. Corporations are not motivated to keep old titles accessible - quite the opposite. There are a lot of tools and culture we could lose to planned obsolescence if pirates didn't do what they do.
posted by signsofrain at 2:41 PM on March 14, 2023


It’s a squandering of human potential so mind boggling it’s very nearly admirable

Again that sort of goes for all of this kind of activity. My impression is that the warez scene has historically skewed strongly towards the stereotypical teenage computer whiz, who hasn’t yet found themselves compelled to apply their talents to anything else. I know of a few very successful software developers who admit that they cut their teeth in that scene (or somewhere adjacent).
posted by atoxyl at 4:59 PM on March 14, 2023


Historically the scene also seems to have been concentrated in Europe. I’m not sure why. I think more recently there have been some major cracking groups out of Asia, too, like 3DM as mentioned in the reddit summary - who were actually also visibly lead by a woman.
posted by atoxyl at 5:09 PM on March 14, 2023 [1 favorite]


So um what's her philosophy?
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 8:01 AM on March 15, 2023


One of the most peculiar internet figures of all time

Peculiar she is, but "one of the most peculiar"?
Okay maybe in the top 100 but not in the top 20
posted by ApplAuD at 9:49 AM on March 15, 2023


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