We first reported on rumors of a new Witcher 3 DLC back at the tail end of 2025, after a Polish financial analyst and a known leaker said separately that a surprise new expansion is in the works. And while that DLC remains firmly in the realm of hopes and dreams for now, with a new year now upon us I am here to tell you that the foundation for that rumor has grown somewhat stronger.
There are two big reasons for this. The first comes from IGN Poland, which said earlier this week (Google translated) that it first heard about this new expansion, “from someone who has repeatedly provided us with reliable insider information,” years ago. IGN Poland said it didn’t publish anything about it at the time because the information all came from a single source (that’s how actual journalism works), but in light of these new rumors it’s opted to make the story public.
IGN Poland said its source at the time claimed the new expansion would take players to the far-off desert of Zerrikania, which is mentioned in passing at a few points in The Witcher games. Zerrikania is also different enough from The Witcher kingdoms we already know that it could be a place where, for instance, Ciri could successfully undergo the Trial of the Grasses, which is commonly believed to kill girls who attempt it—although The Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski clarified in 2025 that he never said in his books that women can’t survive the process and, in fine Sapkowski fashion, he doesn’t care either way.
Even so, given the difficulty of making new witchers (the process has been largely lost, and even when it was in active use it was incredibly dangerous for candidates, killing seven out of 10 potentials), having Ciri go through a same-but-different mutation process in a very distant, more advanced realm makes reasonable narrative sense.
The second reason the rumor feels at least somewhat grounded is far more practical, and has nothing to do with the game. Instead, it’s all about CD Projekt itself. You may recall that when CD Projekt said The Witcher 4 won’t be out until 2027 at the soonest, it did so using some archaic corpo-financial speak during an investors call: “The game will not be launched within the time frame of the first target for the incentive program which ends 31st of December.”
CD Projekt said during that same call, in March 2025, that it still needed to generate a little more than 1 billion Polish zloty (around $277 million) by the end of 2026 in order to achieve that incentive program target—something one investor on the call noted would be “extremely difficult” without releasing any new products.
Noble Securities analyst Mateusz Chrzanowski, who spurred our December 2025 report on the DLC rumor, told Eurogamer that CD Projekt is still roughly PLN700 million short of its goal, with just five financial quarters remaining: “This implies the need for something significantly larger than just another update or a version for a niche platform.”
Something like, for instance, a surprise Witcher 3 DLC. Chrzanowski predicted that a new expansion would ring up roughly $330 million in sales through 2026, translating to nearly PLN1.2 billion, putting it well over the line CD Projekt needs to cross in order to make even more money for its bosses.
To repeat what I said in December, all of that and 20 bucks will get you a copy of the brilliant Witcher 3 expansion Blood and Wine (which you really should play if you haven’t already): CD Projekt has remained stubbornly closed-mouthed about the whole thing, and we don’t have any handy leaks from, say, PEGI or Ubisoft that effectively confirms it. But the sheer weight of the claims are starting to add up. I can’t say that I believe just yet, but I want to.
