There are as many people making The Witcher 3 expansion Songs of the Past – potentially more – than made the original base Witcher 3 game.
CD Projekt Red said in a financial earnings call there are around 190 developers working on The Songs of the Past expansion, announced last week. The Witcher 3 game director Konrad Tomaskiewicz told me that The Witcher 3 team averaged 160 developers, only jumping to around 205 when the Cyberpunk 2077 team joined closer to launch. For an expansion – especially one for an 11 year-old game – that’s a surprisingly large team.
However, the bulk of the Songs of the Past team – in fact almost all of that team – is housed at Songs of the Past co-developer (and arguably primary developer) Fool’s Theory.
CD Projekt Red joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said in the earnings call: “I can share that the expansion is now in an advanced phase of production. Around 190 developers, most of them from our trusted partners at Fool’s Theory, are currently working with us on the project. At the same time, CD Projekt Red provides the creative oversight to safeguard the quality of the Witcher experience.”
Nowakowski didn’t say how many people at CD Projekt Red are working on the expansion, though, but did provide a division-of-labour slide during the earnings report that suggested its team working on the expansion is very small.
The slide (embedded here) shows that as of 30th April 2026, CD Projekt Red has 513 developers working on The Witcher 4, 163 developers on Cyberpunk 2, 83 developers on a project codenamed Sirius, 24 developers on a project codenamed Hadar, 173 in Shared Services, and 19 on ‘Other’.
Let’s rule some of these out. Project Sirius is not Songs of the Past because it’s a separate, single-player-slash-multiplayer Witcher that was once being developed externally by Molasses Flood, until Molasses Flood was bought by CD Projekt Red and became an internal team last year, hence it being listed here. We don’t know much about Sirius but recently a former Destiny 2 lead writer was hired to lead the writing team.
Even less is known about Project Hadar, which seems to be earlier in development, but it’s clearly not Songs of the Past if for no other reason than CD Projekt Red would call it that – there’s no need for codenames now the expansion has been announced.
Shared Services, incidentally, is a category that includes localisation, QA, data, motion capture, and insights and experience developers – the company specifies this. This leaves us with one category the Songs of the Past can be included in: Other. That presumably means there are a maximum of 19 people full-time working on Songs of the Past at CD Projekt Red.
That appears to be a stark division in labour between CD Projekt Red and Fool’s Theory, but it’s worth mentioning that Fool’s Theory is made up of many former CD Projekt Red developers, so creatively they’re of a similar mind. Also, CD Projekt Red might have played a proportionately larger role in helping conceive and design Songs of the Past, and there might be people less formally involved – in more of a consulting role – in feedback and guidance.
Regardless, there being 190 developers working on Songs of the Past suggests an ambitious adventure is in development. In terms of scope, we’ve heard CD Projekt Red reference Witcher 3 expansion Blood and Wine in both the earnings call and in a recent Blood and Wine livestream. In that livestream, CD Projekt Red senior community and social media manager Laura Beitzel said: “Songs of the Past will be aligned with what you’re familiar with in Blood and Wine, and what you’ve come to experience and expect from us when we do our expansions.”
The Blood of Wine comparison suggests we’re being treated to a new location to explore – Blood and Wine introduced the idyllic region of Toussaint – because Hearts of Stone, the other expansion, took place in mostly existing areas. The current frontrunner for the new location is Cidaris, which is a region (the main city has the same name) positioned to the left of the Temeria region we know well from The Witcher 3. There’s a link between the sword Geralt unsheaths in the Songs of the Past artwork and Cidaris which strengthens this.
Housing the new adventure in a new region would give CD Projekt Red and Fool’s Theory a chance to flex more modern graphical muscle without visually overhauling existing areas of the game. To this end, we’ve already seen CD Projekt Red significantly increase the minimum PC requirements for The Witcher 3, in particular dropping support for HDDs and any Windows operating system that isn’t Windows 11.
We know that the expansion will star Geralt rather than Ciri, who’ll lead The Witcher 4, by the way, but we don’t know anything about timelines. It makes sense for Ciri to be involved somehow given the expansion’s positioning before The Witcher 4, but whether it takes place after the events of The Witcher 3 or before them, we’re currently none the wiser. Maybe there are flashbacks to a “Past” referenced by the title, or maybe it takes place in the past. We’re due to find out more later in the summer.
