On May 28 at 5pm CEST, CD Projekt RED is hosting a special anniversary stream for The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine, returning to Toussaint with two senior developers a decade after the expansion launched. Thirty minutes after the stream begins, the Warsaw-listed studio will publish its first-quarter 2026 earnings on the same afternoon.
Fans see a possible tease for a long-rumored third Witcher 3 expansion. The studio’s calendar suggests something quieter and more strategic: keep a decade-old game commercially live through 2027, because the next mainline release will not ship before then, and the franchise plan behind it needs the catalog working overtime.
The Stream, the Earnings Call, and the 30-Minute Gap
CD Projekt RED announced the broadcast on May 26 from the official The Witcher account on X. The post invited fans to return to Toussaint via the studio’s YouTube and Twitch channels, with environment art director Kacper Niepokólczycki and senior writer Magdalena Zych hosting.
The stream’s timing is the part nobody can ignore. CD Projekt’s group Q1 2026 earnings publish at roughly 5:30 PM CEST on the same day, per the company’s published investor calendar. That puts a celebratory developer chat half an hour ahead of a quarterly numbers drop, on a Polish-listed equity that trades on revenue visibility for The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077.
Two senior names hosting a livestream for a ten-year-old expansion is not a routine community date. It is also not, by CD Projekt’s own statement, an announcement event. The studio has told Polish outlets it does not comment on rumors or speculation, and the original tweet contains no language hinting at new content. What it does is set a stage twice in one afternoon, once for fans, once for shareholders.
What Fool’s Theory Has Reportedly Been Building
Polish insider Borys Nieśpielak, whose track record on CD Projekt leaks is solid, has claimed since late last year that the studio quietly contracted Warsaw indie studio Fool’s Theory to build a story expansion that bridges The Witcher 3 with the next Ciri-led sequel. Multiple independent sources later corroborated parts of the report via Insider Gaming, and IGN Poland said whispers of an expansion had circulated for years.
Fool’s Theory makes sense on paper. The Warsaw studio is staffed in part by former Witcher 3 developers, earned strong narrative reviews for The Thaumaturge, and is already working with CD Projekt on the remake of the original The Witcher. Adding a Wild Hunt expansion to that pipeline reuses the studio’s institutional memory of the franchise without taking developers off the main sequel in Warsaw.
Polish brokerage Noble Securities priced the rumor concretely. Analyst Mateusz Chrzanowski first told investors after The Game Awards in late 2025 to expect the DLC in May 2026, then revised that to a September 2026 window at roughly $30, with projected sales of 11 million copies. Those are not throwaway numbers. At that price and unit forecast the expansion would generate revenue in the high nine figures, enough to materially move the line on a year when the studio’s next mainline title is still in production.
Fans, predictably, are doing the rest of the work.
Am I getting baited again?
That post, from a fan replying to the official stream announcement on May 26, captures the mood. Other replies on the same thread asked for confirmation or threatened to freak out if the third DLC is not announced. The studio has said nothing.
Zerrikania or Velen: the Setting Dispute
The reporting consensus on what the expansion would actually contain has shifted twice in five months, and the disagreement is itself useful information about how thin the source pool is. The competing claims, in rough chronological order:
- Polish outlet PPE.pl and IGN Poland (January): the expansion takes place in Zerrikania, the unexplored eastern desert region of the Witcher universe, described in lore as a land of scorching sun. PPE called the setting comparable to Dune.
- Former Polish games journalist UV o grach (February): not a brand-new region at all. The DLC instead reuses Witcher 3 assets and stays close to Velen, the swampy No Man’s Land area players already know from the base game, with the new content filling empty spaces on the existing map.
- GameSpot, citing insiders (late February): the bridge-to-Witcher-4 framing holds, but the geography stays inside Temeria and Redania rather than venturing east. Industry sources also tied the project to internal sales targets tied to employee bonus triggers.
- Lore breadcrumbs: the School of the Manticore, name-dropped in Blood and Wine and elaborated in the Gwent card spin-off, sits in Zerrikania. That is the slim canonical thread keeping the desert theory alive even after the asset-reuse leak.
What unites every version of the story: the new content is positioned narratively as a hand-off, with Geralt’s third Wild Hunt episode setting up Ciri’s first mainline game.
Why the Catalog Has to Carry 2026
CD Projekt’s revenue line has been carried by back-catalog sales for years, but the next 18 months are the tightest stretch. As of lifetime unit sales figures published by Statista, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has sold more than 60 million copies, generating about PLN 2.4 billion (roughly $688 million) over a decade. The base game and the Game of the Year edition account for those units; expansion sales are counted separately.
That cash flow is doing structural work right now. CD Projekt’s own Q1 2025 disclosure put 422 of the company’s 730 developers on the next mainline Witcher, with a smaller 96-person team in pre-production on Cyberpunk 2. Almost every other project the company has announced sits behind those two on the calendar.
| Project | Status | Earliest Plausible Release |
|---|---|---|
| The Witcher 4 (Ciri-led sequel) | Full-scale production since Nov 2024 | 2027 |
| Cyberpunk 2 | Pre-production, joint Boston/Warsaw | 2028 or later |
| The Witcher 1 remake (Canis Majoris) | Concept phase at Fool’s Theory | After the next mainline Witcher |
| Project Sirius (Witcher multiplayer) | In development at Molasses Flood, Boston | After the next mainline Witcher |
| Project Hadar (new original IP) | Foundations established | 2030s |
Nothing in that pipeline ships in 2026. The only release-shaped object available to put in front of customers in the next twelve months is either a paid DLC for the decade-old game or a long-delayed mod-support update for the same title. Both target the same revenue line. Both keep Geralt visible while Ciri’s debut runs through its final two-plus years of development. A 60-million-unit catalog at near-zero marginal production cost is the bridge, and the May 28 stream is, at minimum, a reminder it exists.
The Six-Year Trilogy Math
CD Projekt co-CEO Michał Nowakowski reaffirmed the franchise plan on the company’s Q3 2025 earnings call.
Our plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a six-year period.
Nowakowski added that the schedule implies shorter development between each title, meaning the second and third entries would lean on systems and assets built for the first. Cross-referenced against the production start in November 2024, the practical reading is a roughly 2027 launch for the Ciri-led sequel, then 2030 and 2033 for the two follow-ups. None of those dates are official.
Cyberpunk 2 sits inside the same window. Nowakowski has told investors not to expect the sequel before 2028, and other CD Projekt statements have pushed the realistic window toward the end of the decade. The studio’s Boston operation, expanded after The Molasses Flood was fully absorbed in April 2025, is doing pre-production on that project in parallel.
The math leaves a gap. Three mainline Witcher games in six years is, by industry standards, an unusually compressed cadence, and it depends on Unreal Engine 5 tooling and shared assets carrying scale efficiencies the studio has not yet demonstrated. The trilogy plan also presumes the back catalog can fund development at the current burn rate without major revenue events between now and 2027. A third paid Witcher 3 expansion would be the cleanest way to engineer one of those events on schedule.
No More Cyberpunk DLC, But the Witcher Door Is Open
The studio has been clearer about what it will not do than what it will. CD Projekt has explicitly ruled out further paid expansions for Cyberpunk 2077, telling fans the next return to Night City has to wait for the sequel. Phantom Liberty, which has sold roughly 10 million copies, was the last word. The studio is keeping that universe alive through other media instead, including a Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 panel scheduled for Anime Expo in Los Angeles on July 3.
The Witcher franchise sits in the opposite posture. No comment on rumors, no denial of a third Wild Hunt expansion, and a livestream booked for the day of the quarterly numbers. That is not how a studio closes a door. It is also not how a studio opens one outright, given the public anniversary framing the broadcast carries. The reasonable read is that CD Projekt is keeping optionality on a release lever it may decide to pull later this year, depending on how Q1 trends and how Fool’s Theory’s deliverables land.
If the May 28 broadcast ends with nothing but ten-year-anniversary anecdotes from Toussaint, the rumor stays a rumor, but the financial argument for a paid expansion before the sequel ships only gets stronger between here and September. If it ends with even a five-second logo card, the stream will have done in 60 minutes what most marketing campaigns take a quarter to set up, and the earnings call that follows half an hour later will be answering different questions than the ones already on analysts’ lists.
