CD Projekt Announces 2027 Witcher 3 Expansion as Shares Slide

CD Projekt RED told the market on Wednesday that a third paid expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, titled Songs of the Past, will release in 2027 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Shares of the Warsaw-listed publisher, trading up earlier in the morning, reversed course and finished down roughly 4% by 0948 GMT, according to a Reuters report from Gdansk.

Fans got the answer they had wanted since the studio scheduled a Wild Hunt anniversary livestream for May 28. Investors got a different signal. The expansion arrives a year later than the sell-side desk had penciled in, on the same calendar slot many analysts had been modelling for the long-awaited next mainline instalment. The math on that collision is what the share price reflected.

Geralt Returns, Stockholders Leave

The official Songs of the Past announcement on cdprojekt.com landed just before midday Warsaw time, after a Red Launcher storefront entry briefly leaked the expansion’s existence on Tuesday evening. The new release returns players to the boots of Geralt of Rivia for what the publisher described as a brand-new adventure. The Polish studio is co-developing the project with Fool’s Theory, a Bielsko-Biała team founded in 2015 by veterans who shipped the original Wild Hunt.

By the morning bell on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, CDR shares had been tracking gains in the broader WIG20 index. By the time the news cleared the wires, the stock was down to 239 złotys ($65.70), a 5.16% intraday slide, per Game World Observer. The Reuters tape closed the morning slightly tighter at around 4% lower.

Michał Wojciechowski, an analyst at Ipopema Securities, told Reuters the market had been expecting the expansion to release in 2026 and that the delay carried implications well beyond this single product. His read echoed across investor chats inside the day: a 2027 expansion meant something was happening upstream in the slate. CD Projekt’s Q1 2026 earnings call is scheduled for Thursday, May 28, giving management one trading session to frame the story.

Why 2027 Was the Wrong Number

Wild Hunt shipped in May 2015. A 2027 release would arrive twelve years and eleven months after the base game’s launch, an unusually long tail for a single-player console RPG to reactivate with paid story content. The previous two add-ons, Hearts of Stone in October 2015 and Blood and Wine in May 2016, both shipped inside the original game’s first commercial year.

That timing built the assumption baked into sell-side models heading into Wednesday: any third add-on would either land before the franchise’s tenth anniversary in 2025 or get bundled into a remaster cycle. It did neither.

What the buy side had been pricing for the back half of 2026 was a different revenue shape entirely. A Q4 2026 expansion would have provided the holiday quarter with a high-margin catalogue product before Cyberpunk 2 and the new Witcher trilogy began absorbing more capital expense. Pushing the same product into 2027 collapses that revenue smoothing into the same window where the next major game was supposed to debut.

More information is promised in late summer 2026, per the publisher’s announcement. That puts the marketing beat for the new Geralt story inside the next earnings cycle, not this one. The selling on Wednesday was therefore less about disappointment in the product and more about a model revision: the 2027 slot is occupied, the 2026 slot is empty.

The Witcher 4 Date That Just Got Quieter

The fourth main instalment of the franchise, formally The Witcher IV, was officially revealed at The Game Awards in December 2024. CFO Piotr Nielubowicz has told two consecutive investor conferences, including the Q3 2025 call, that 2027 was the earliest possible release window. Wednesday’s announcement made that earliest case meaningfully harder to defend.

What the Market Had Penciled In

Sell-side models for CDR through early May 2026 had assumed a Witcher IV launch in late 2027, with the third Wild Hunt expansion providing catalogue revenue support across the prior twelve months. Wojciechowski’s note to Reuters captured the resulting question directly: with the expansion now occupying the 2027 calendar slot, the next mainline game could slip to 2028. That has implications for the studio’s reported six-year window to ship the whole Witcher IV-V-VI trilogy and for the gap year that would precede Cyberpunk 2.

The Stats Behind the Slate

Per CD Projekt’s own February 2026 production update, the active project headcount looked like this heading into Wednesday’s announcement:

• 71 developers assigned to Project Sirius at The Molasses Flood near Boston
• 26 developers working on Project Hadar’s foundational design
• 400-plus developers reported in earlier disclosures as scaled into Witcher IV full production
• 2 unannounced in-house projects beyond those listed above

What 2028 Means for Cyberpunk 2

Cyberpunk 2, codenamed Orion within CDPR’s Boston subsidiary, has been telegraphed as the studio’s parallel pillar to the new Witcher trilogy. If the next mainline RPG shifts to 2028, the natural inference is that Orion gets pushed further along the runway or that the publisher leans more heavily on Geralt’s farewell story and the in-progress Witcher 1 remake to fill the revenue gap. Neither outcome is a disaster, but each adds an extra year of operating burn for a studio that has been hiring aggressively since 2024.

Fool’s Theory Takes the Wheel

Bielsko-Biała is a city of about 170,000 in southern Poland, closer to the Czech border than to Warsaw. It is also the headquarters of Fool’s Theory, the studio Wednesday’s announcement names as co-developer. The shop was founded in 2015 by Jakub Rokosz, who spent five years at CDPR helping ship The Witcher 2 and the base Wild Hunt, and design director Karolina Kuzia-Rokosz, who worked the same two projects before leaving.

The studio’s profile inside the industry has been quietly built on contract work, not on its own catalogue. The list it has accumulated reads more like a who’s-who of the modern Western RPG than the resume of a small Polish studio with one self-published title.

Recent shipped credits at the co-developer include:

• The Witcher 1 remake under CDPR creative supervision, built in Unreal Engine 5
• Baldur’s Gate III development support for Larian Studios
• Divinity: Original Sin 2 technical and design support, also for Larian
• Seven: The Days Long Gone, the studio’s only self-published title, released in 2017

The co-development model on this third expansion mirrors the structure CDPR already runs on the Witcher 1 remake. The Polish parent retains creative supervision; the smaller studio carries the production load. That arrangement is also how CDPR is approaching Project Sirius at The Molasses Flood and Project Hadar internally, the Boston shop CDPR acquired in 2021 and the foundational new-IP team inside the parent.

Hearts of Stone, Blood and Wine, and the Bar They Set

The two prior Witcher 3 expansions remain reference points for what publisher-led story DLC can deliver. Hearts of Stone added roughly ten hours of content for $9.99 in October 2015 and earned an 89 Metacritic score on PC. Blood and Wine’s official CDPR retrospective notes its May 2016 release at $19.99 with thirty-plus hours of new content; the expansion scored 92 on Metacritic and swept best-RPG honours at The Game Awards 2016.

The third Wild Hunt release has to clear a critical bar that both predecessors set when CDPR’s internal headcount on the Witcher 3 codebase was at peak. It is being co-developed with an external studio, more than a decade after the engine team shipped the base game, with a separate Witcher 1 remake actively borrowing the same talent pool. The product can still land well, but the asymmetry between the development conditions of Blood and Wine and those of this new release is something even sympathetic analysts have begun raising in published notes.

CD Projekt’s Crowded Pipeline

The Warsaw publisher is now juggling more concurrent projects than at any point in its history. CEO Michał Nowakowski confirmed in January 2026 that the Witcher franchise alone has crossed 85 million units lifetime, with Wild Hunt contributing 60 million of that total and earning 250-plus Game of the Year awards since 2015. The slate trying to extend that record, ordered by current development stage and headcount, looks like this:

1. The Witcher IV in full-scale production since late 2024, with a 2027-or-later release window per management commentary
2. Cyberpunk 2 (codename Orion) in early production at CD Projekt RED North America in Boston
3. The Witcher 1 remake at Fool’s Theory under CDPR creative supervision, built in Unreal Engine 5
4. The third Wild Hunt expansion, in co-development with the same Polish partner for 2027
5. Project Sirius at The Molasses Flood, a multiplayer Witcher-universe project staffed at 71
6. Project Hadar, a brand-new IP at 26 developers, building Unreal Engine prototypes

Six concurrent productions, against an industry backdrop in which most major Western studios are consolidating headcount, is a deliberate bet. Investors have been broadly willing to fund it because Wild Hunt’s long tail keeps the catalogue revenue line attractive and because the new strategy laid out in CDPR’s 2022 group strategy update for the next decade committed the publisher to multiple parallel pillars. The question Wednesday’s announcement raised is whether the bet is now stretching the studio’s shipping cadence past what it can deliver on time.

Thursday’s Q1 2026 consolidated quarterly report from CD Projekt is the next data release. If management confirms a 2028 release window for The Witcher IV during the call, the new Geralt-led expansion becomes the dominant franchise event of the next eighteen months and Wednesday’s selling reads as forward pricing. If the publisher holds the 2027 line and absorbs both releases in parallel, the burden then shifts to a delivery slate tighter than the studio has ever tried to ship.