CD Projekt Red Promises The Witcher 4 Will Still Come in a Box, Discs or Not

I still have the box.

Not the game - the box. The Witcher 3 one, on a shelf behind me, with the map and the stickers and a soundtrack CD I have genuinely never played once. It ate a serious chunk of a student budget, I've moved flats twice since, and it's still there. That's what physical means to some of us. It was never really about the disc.

So when CD Projekt Red joint-CEO Michał Nowakowski said The Witcher 4 will still "have a box" even after Sony stops pressing discs for new PlayStation games - honestly, this one got me.

Speaking to The Game Business, Nowakowski was refreshingly straight about where the line sits. CD Projekt Red doesn't get a vote on Sony's plans. Sony is ending physical disc production for new PlayStation releases in January 2028, and no studio, however beloved, is talking anyone out of that. What CDPR does still control is what actually lands in your hands on launch day, and he described it as something you're going to want to open up and enjoy.

A box without a disc is still a box

I know how that sounds. "Congratulations, you paid extra for cardboard and a download code." That's the cynical read, and I get why people jump straight to it, because plenty of publishers have earned that suspicion by charging full price for an empty case with a code slip rattling around inside.

But that's a publisher choice, not a law of physics. CD Projekt Red has spent years being unusually good at this exact thing: maps you can actually read, art books that aren't glorified pamphlets, little extras that make opening the thing feel like an event instead of a receipt. If anyone can make a disc-free collector's edition feel like it was put together by people who love the same stuff you do, I'd bet on them before most.

What sits with me longer is the quiet part underneath. Sony's reasoning is that the overwhelming majority of PlayStation game sales are already digital, and that's just true - it's where players went. Games released before the cutoff keep their discs. Nothing already on your shelf vanishes. But "most people don't use it" has never been a great argument for removing the option from the people who do, and it stings a little more when preservation, resale, lending a game to your nephew and simply owning the thing you paid for all land on the wrong side of that ledger.

So I'll take the win where I can find it. A developer saying out loud "you'll still get a box" is a small promise, and it doesn't undo the bigger shift. But it's the right instinct. Somebody in that room still thinks the shelf matters.

Now I just want to know what's going in it.

Image: włodi from London, UK / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Witcher_-_a_fragment_of_the_game_world%27s_map_(2280009704).jpg