Owlcat is giving Switch 2 owners of Rogue Trader all its DLC for free after a broken launch

Owlcat Games shipped Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader on Nintendo Switch 2 in December 2025 and the port was a mess. Crashes, frame rate drops, long loads, menus that did not respond. On July 7 the studio pushed a large patch to fix it, and then it did the part that studios almost never do: it made every piece of paid add-on content free for the people who bought the broken version.

What Switch 2 owners actually get

Owlcat's announcement is specific about the scope, which is more than most apologies manage:

"In order to make up for the disappointment of the initial launch, starting today, all additional in-game content will be free on Nintendo Switch 2, including Deluxe Edition content and all DLC. The first two DLCs, Void Shadows and Lex Imperialis, are available now; the third and upcoming fourth DLC will follow later."

So that is the Digital Deluxe extras plus the paid expansions, at no cost, on that platform. The two released expansions are live now. The third and fourth arrive when they arrive.

There is a catch worth naming, and it is a storefront problem rather than a studio one. Some regions do not allow a paid item to be listed at zero, so in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Japan and South Korea, Owlcat set the content to a minimal price instead of free. If you are in one of those markets, you are paying something, even if it is close to nothing.

The patch matters more than the giveaway

Free DLC on a game that still runs badly is a coupon, not a fix. The July 7 update is the actual repair job: crash fixes, performance optimization, and visual and presentation work aimed at the specific complaints the Switch 2 version drew at launch. Owlcat said it was "determined to make things right" with the update. Whether the port now holds a stable frame rate through the late chapters, when the screen fills with enemies and the encounter math starts grinding, is something players will settle over the next couple of weeks rather than something a press release can settle.

Worth separating the two things, because they get muddled. Rogue Trader on Switch 2 was not a game with problems. It was a game that did not work properly on the hardware it was sold for, seven months ago. The people who paid full price for it in December have been waiting since December.

Why this is unusual

The normal industry response to a bad port is a slow patch cadence, a community manager absorbing the anger, and silence about compensation. Owlcat instead handed back the entire monetization tail of the game on that platform. Rogue Trader has sold more than two million copies across PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch 2, so this is a real revenue line the studio chose to write off rather than a token gesture attached to a rounding error.

Credit where it belongs: this is a CRPG that a mid-size studio built and then had to rescue on a console it clearly struggled with. The developers who spent seven months optimizing a game engine for a handheld are the ones who made the fix possible, not the marketing calendar.

The cleaner version of this story is the one where the port ships in a working state and nobody has to give anything away. That version did not happen. Given the version that did, giving people the expansions instead of an apology tweet is the right call.