The Witcher 3 Remastered Free Upgrade: Release Date, Eligible Platforms & How to Get It

CD Projekt RED announced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered on 25 August, and the headline everywhere is the same: a free upgrade, arriving 29 September.

That is true. It is also incomplete in a way that matters if you are one of the people it does not cover — and the studio has not published the list that would tell you which one you are.

When does The Witcher 3 Remastered come out?

29 September 2026, on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and Battle.net. All five on the same day.

Two of those are new ground for the game. Switch 2 gets a native version rather than a port of the cloud release, and Battle.net is the game’s first appearance on Blizzard’s storefront, through a partnership CD Projekt announced alongside the remaster. Microsoft’s platforms gain Xbox Play Anywhere support.

The remaster is being co-developed with Yigsoft, a studio that has worked on The Witcher 3 before. It brings reworked visuals, changes to combat, traversal and mount handling, new sign effects, a revamped skill tree, transmogrification, an expanded photo mode and new finishers.

Which platforms qualify for the free upgrade?

CD Projekt has not said. Its announcement calls Remastered “a free upgrade for existing The Witcher 3 owners on qualifying platforms” and never defines the term. The game’s official site repeats the same phrase and also stops there.

What coverage has consistently reported — and what the launch lineup implies — is this:

Treat the first three rows as solid and the last three as needing care. The distinction is not pedantry: two of the five launch platforms are storefronts where you do not already own anything, so “free upgrade” cannot apply to them by definition.

What if you own it on PS4 or Xbox One?

You are probably fine, but through a door nobody has mentioned in this announcement. The Witcher 3 has offered a free current-generation upgrade since 2022, and that path is still open.

The practical sequence is: claim the PS5 or Xbox Series version of the game you already own, then receive Remastered on 29 September like any other current-gen owner. On PlayStation that means signing in on the PS5 and finding the game in the store. On Xbox there is a hardware catch — if what you own is a physical Xbox One disc, you need a console with a disc drive, which rules out the Series S.

No CD Projekt document says this chains into the remaster. It is the reasonable reading of two facts that are each documented separately, and it is worth knowing that nobody has confirmed it as one path.

Do Game Pass players get the upgrade?

No, and the timing is unkind. The Witcher 3 leaves Xbox Game Pass on 31 August 2026 — four weeks before Remastered launches, and about six months after it joined in February.

A subscription was never ownership, so even players who put a hundred hours in through Game Pass have no entitlement to upgrade. On 29 September they will have neither the original nor the remaster unless they buy one.

This is the single most avoidable disappointment in the whole announcement, and it appears in almost none of the coverage because the Game Pass rotation and the remaster reveal are different stories filed by different people.

How do you get the free upgrade?

Mostly by doing nothing. If you own the game on a storefront that qualifies, Remastered arrives as an update to what you already have.

• On PC, it patches in through whichever launcher you bought it on — Steam, GOG or Epic. Buying it on one does not give it to you on another, and it does not give you the Battle.net release either.
• On PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, the same: an update to the installed game, no claim step.
• On PS4 or Xbox One, do the current-gen claim first, ideally before 29 September so the update finds you.
• On Switch, the reported route is that owning the original Switch version gets you the Switch 2 version at no cost once you have the console. That has not been confirmed by CD Projekt or Nintendo in anything we could find.

One thing you do not have to wait for: Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are already free, to everyone who owns the base game, as of the 25 August announcement. If you skipped the expansions years ago, they are in your library now rather than in September.

What about Songs of the Past?

That one is not free, and it is not this year. Songs of the Past is a paid expansion arriving in 2027, taking Geralt to a new region called Letten, with a new weapon — a chain — and a set of new enemies.

It is co-developed with Fool’s Theory, a studio led by Witcher 3 veterans, and it is being wishlisted now on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2. Buying it on Battle.net unlocks a Geralt-inspired skin in Diablo 4, with details promised at BlizzCon in September.

Everything on this page was read from CD Projekt RED’s own announcement and the game’s official site on 26 August 2026. The one thing neither document contains is the list of qualifying platforms, which is why the middle of this article is more careful than the headlines are.