CDPR and Blizzard Want You to Buy The Witcher 3 Again — On Battle.net — Just to Get a Skin

A Geralt Barbarian skin in Diablo 4 sounds pretty awesome on paper. Two iconic franchises crossing over, Geralt cleaving through demons in Sanctuary... sign me up, right? That was my reaction for about five seconds until I read the fine print. To unlock the skin, you need to pre-order The Witcher 3's new "Songs of the Past" DLC on Battle.net specifically. Not Steam. Not GOG, which is CDPR's own storefront. Battle.net. Blizzard's launcher.

The Witcher 3 has sold something like 50 million copies at this point, and the vast majority of those are on Steam. Millions of players have hundreds of hours logged, multiple playthroughs, every DLC purchased on day one. These are the people who kept that game on the Steam bestseller charts for years. And now CDPR is telling them that their loyalty and their existing library don't matter — if they want a cool crossover cosmetic in a completely different game, they need to re-buy on a platform nobody asked for.

This isn't a crossover. It's a platform migration scheme wearing a Geralt costume. Blizzard wants Battle.net installs and active users to pad their numbers, and CDPR is happy to double-dip on a game people already own to make it happen. They're banking on the fact that dressing it up as a fun collaboration will distract from what it actually is: two massive publishers using a cosmetic as bait to squeeze more money out of the most loyal segment of their audience.

And the pre-order angle makes it even worse. They're not just asking you to buy the DLC on Battle.net — they want you to pre-order it there. So you're committing money to an unreleased product on a platform you don't use, for a skin in a game that has its own overpriced cosmetic shop already. The layers of "screw you, pay me" here are genuinely impressive.

What bugs me most is that CDPR used to be the company gamers pointed to as the good guys. No DRM on GOG, free next-gen upgrades, generous DLC pricing. Somewhere along the way that goodwill became a resource to be spent rather than maintained. Partnering with Blizzard, a company that has monetized every square inch of Diablo 4, to run what amounts to a storefront hustle is a far cry from the CDPR that shipped 16 free DLCs for The Witcher 3 back in 2015.

If you're a Diablo 4 player who wants the skin bad enough, that's your call and your money. But nobody should pretend this is anything other than what it is. Two billion-dollar companies figured out they could use nostalgia and FOMO to get you to double-purchase a decade-old game on a launcher you don't want. That's not a collaboration. That's a grift with good marketing.