Witcher 3’s Songs of the Past DLC will test the future of the series

The Witcher 3 came out in 2015, and though the RPG remains a beloved classic, a lot has changed in those 11 years. CD Projekt Red, the Polish studio behind the open-world RPG, fell in and out of the public’s good graces with Cyberpunk 2077. Gwent became a full-on game in its own right, and Netflix turned Geralt’s hair into a meme. But the quietest — and perhaps most meaningful — change in regard to The Witcher 3‘s upcoming Songs of the Past expansion is happening behind the scenes.

CD Projekt Red’s 2015 budget breakdown of The Witcher 3 states that the game’s core team consisted of around 240 people. The successes of The Witcher 3 (65 million copies sold) and Cyberpunk 2077 (35 million copies sold) have allowed CD Projekt Red to grow. As of February 2026, the developer’s employs 933 people.

Before CD Projekt released The Witcher 3, it was an ambitious, mid-sized studio mostly known to hardcore gamers as the company that ran the PC storefront GOG. In 2014, the company said that most of its profits were driven by GOG. It was that money that bankrolled The Witcher 3‘s $81 million budget and extensive marketing campaign. To put that into perspective: Ghost of Tsushima, a 2020 blockbuster game, had a reported budget of around $60 million. Arguably, the guaranteed GOG revenue flow allowed for the massive scope and creative risk-taking that defined The Witcher 3. Well, that and the reported crunch conditions that saw CD Projekt employees pulling long hours. The point here is that the company used to be a modest outfit. It could afford to, and had reason to, curry favor through a long list of free Witcher 3 updates.

These days, it doesn’t even own GOG anymore — and the company is on the threshold of being a big-budget studio. It’s still smaller than the army that makes franchises like Call of Duty, but modern CD Projekt Red has more in common with Take-Two than Sandfall Interactive. In 2023, the studio that once employed only 240 developers was big enough to comfortably lay off 100 people. The Polish company has also spent the last decade acquiring companies — including a Boston-based studio focused on future Cyberpunk projects — and expanding into mobile. The things it makes aren’t just games: they’re intellectual property now.

Image: Studio Trigger/Netflix

Of course, not every single one of those 933 employees is working on Songs of the Past. The DLC is being developed with another studio, Fool’s Theory, a small company made up of former Witcher 3 veterans. As of January 2026, around 100 people who worked on The Witcher 3 still remain at CD Projekt.

But some specific key figures, like Witcher 3 director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, art directors Marian Chomiak and Bartłomiej Gaweł, creative director Sebastian Stępień, and lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, have left the company. Jakub Szamalek, a former senior Witcher 3 writer, is now at Fool’s Theory.

The stakes of an expansion for an 11-year-old title are much lower than a fully-fledged Theoretically, the expansion is a great way for CD Projekt’s newer members to immerse themselves in the world of The Witcher before tackling a sequel. Songs of the Past might even be a good avenue to get creative in ways that The Witcher 4 may not allow.

Image: CD Projekt Red

Songs of the Past will serve as a crossroads, one which many gaming companies have faced. Studios like Larian and FromSoftware have proven that money and mainstream appeal can empower midsize studios to realize their vision in bigger and bolder ways. Then there are companies like Bethesda and BioWare, which, for all their financial successes, some fans regard with a sense of loss. These aren’t perfect comparisons, and the conditions of each of these studios are different. Still, it could go either way for CD Projekt Red. But if The Witcher 3 that you play in 2027 — or Witcher 4 after that — feels a little different from what you experienced before, don’t be surprised.