From one perspective, Denuvo isn’t entirely without merit.
The hacker Empress, formerly known for cracking Denuvo, kept her promise and recently published a manifesto explaining why she left that line of work.
After my last release (a Denuvo game crack) in the summer of 2023, something unexpected happened. I suddenly developed serious health issues from extreme sleep deprivation and a lack of rest, and I was explicitly warned that if I didn’t address it immediately the consequences could be fatal. As a result, I had to abruptly step away from producing cracks and focus exclusively on my own projects.
She set out to build a “universal system” for adjusting character body proportions in games, aiming to eliminate what she called the “plague of skinny characters,” which she found repulsive.
Work on that tool further damaged her health, and at one point she halted her activities to concentrate on recovering.
By 2025 she realized she had lost the drive to crack Denuvo and said she had “seen the truth.”
She claims that at one time she had a prototype of a “brilliant,” “utterly superior” Denuvo-cracking system.
Empress came to understand that she was “feeding thieves and ungrateful, deceitful people,” wasting her time, energy, and health while “rarely receiving proper recognition or gratitude—only more demands and no respect.”
She also reminded readers that video games are “products of hard work” and urged people to purchase them.
Additionally, she argued that piracy can harm mental well-being and that one should not encourage it.
Overall, in Empress’s view Denuvo has some positive aspects—for example, the DRM can prevent so-called “careless users” from breaking and corrupting games.
Source: iXBT.games