CDPR never even thought about charging for the Witcher 3 remaster - and that tells you everything
In an industry that happily sells you the same game two or three times, CD Projekt Red is handing a fully overhauled Witcher 3 to every owner for free. For players in our region, where this game has changed hands for a decade, that's a bigger deal than it sounds.
Jakov Mikelić
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
How much does a full remaster of an 11-year-old RPG cost these days? If you ask most publishers, somewhere between 10 and 70 euros, depending on how shameless they're feeling. If you ask CD Projekt Red: nothing. The studio says charging for the newly revealed Witcher 3 Remastered never even crossed its mind.
And this isn't some lazy resolution bump. The remaster shown at Gamescom last week overhauls the game visually, but also reworks the stuff people actually complained about for a decade - the combat, enemy behaviour, horse riding, the skill trees. That's real development work, the kind other publishers routinely package as a "definitive edition" and put back on the shelf at full price. Here it lands as a free upgrade for everyone who owns the game, on top of the new Songs of the Past expansion, which the studio says grew out of a couple of "happy accidents" during development.
Why this matters more here than in most places
I'd honestly bet The Witcher 3 is one of the most-owned games in this part of Europe. It's been in every sale for ten years, regularly dropping to the price of a coffee and a pastry. Discs have been bought, sold, lent and passed around locally so many times that some copies have probably seen more of the region than their owners have. And every single one of those copies counts - a second-hand disc from years ago, a key from some 2016 sale, the GOG version you grabbed for pocket change. All of it gets the full overhaul.
Compare that with the standard industry playbook, where a next-gen upgrade costs extra, a remaster is a new SKU, and a remake is a full-price release of a game you finished twice already.
Let's be fair, though: this isn't charity. CDPR is keeping the brand warm ahead of the next Witcher, and after Cyberpunk 2077's rough launch the studio learned precisely what goodwill is worth in hard currency. The free current-gen update for The Witcher 3 a few years back was the same play. It's marketing - but it's marketing that leaves money in your pocket instead of pulling more out of it, and that's a distinction I can live with.
The funny part is that the cheapest ticket to a "new" RPG this season might be the dusty copy you already own. If goodwill really is a business strategy, I'd love to see a few bigger publishers steal this one instead of the usual ones.
Image: Sergey Galyonkin / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladislav_as_Geralt_from_Witcher_3_at_Igromir_2013.jpg