With the recent release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s free Remastered update, Nintendo Switch 2 players have now discovered that owners of the physical copy of The Witcher 3 for Nintendo Switch are given a free digital copy of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered on the Switch 2. Reddit user Erik_REF confirmed this through a screenshot showing two distinct tiles for The Witcher 3 and Remastered.
“My brother and I were able to claim the full game’s Virtual Game Card for both of our accounts with the same single cartridge,” wrote Erik_REF.
As commenters have pointed out, this was quite a generous move by CD Projekt RED, since companies have been known to charge for current-gen upgrades for their games. Even major companies like Naughty Dog have done this in the past, as could be seen with the Remastered update for The Last of Us Part 2 that costs $5 on the PlayStation Store.
“That’s a genuinely generous way to handle it,” wrote a Reddit user in the comments section. “Most publishers would have charged an upgrade fee, and letting the cartridge unlock a digital copy for more than one account is more than anyone expected. CD Projekt keeps doing this sort of thing, and it’s a big part of why people forgive them for Cyberpunk‘s launch.”
This is far from the first time CD Projekt RED has done something like this. Even during the early days of GOG – its digital distribution platform at the time – the company was known for helping customers facing issues with their physical copies of The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings by giving them a free digital copy through GOG.
When it comes to The Witcher 3 in particular, Xbox players are also in for a treat, since the Remastered update makes it a Play Anywhere title. This means that Xbox players can also enjoy the RPG on a Windows PC.
In the meantime, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered is also available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S as a free update. It brings a host of improvements over the base game, ranging from visual improvements to changes in combat and traversal. In our review, we gave Remastered a score of 9 out of 10 thanks to the quality of these improvements as well as a streamlining of the skill tree.
The launch of Remastered has also been quite successful on PC, where it managed to set a new record of concurrent players, with 120,324 people playing the new version of the 2016 RPG at the same time. The last time The Witcher 3 hit such a high player count was with the debut of Netflix’s live-action adaptation, which saw 103,329 concurrent players, and 2024’s Next-Gen update, which saw 89,451 concurrent players.
The improvements brought along with Remastered were seemingly quite crucial for the upcoming Songs of the Past expansion. Director Jakub Rokosz spoke about how the expansion will make full use of many of the update’s improvements while also allowing the team to ensure that the new setting of Letten looks as good as possible.
