A new Witcher 3 expansion, Songs of the Past, was hurriedly announced on May 27 after CD Projekt Red accidentally leaked its own reveal ahead of schedule. On May 29, the Steam player count for The Witcher 3 jumped to 29,166 – one of the highest points seen all year, and a peak ahead of several months as far back as 2020, according to SteamDB.
As CDPR superfan Alox noted, this is the biggest Steam spike The Witcher 3 has seen since February 22, back when it was part of the Steam Lunar Sale and discounted down to just $7.99.
There's a strong correlation between discounts and player counts on Steam, but big news or updates can also bring fans back. May saw no such discount for The Witcher 3 (technically, an April Medieval Fest discount lasted until the very start of the month), nor did it have new content ready to play, but it still managed a sharp jump in players for the 10th anniversary of the game's Blood and Wine expansion.
I'd wager that a small portion of those players were fans excitedly booting up the game to see if Songs of the Past was already out. It feels very much like the kind of thing a studio might shadow-drop, but the expansion is actually coming in 2027 and will serve as a snacky prologue while The Witcher 4 brews.
The studio has described Songs of the Past as a "trip down memory lane" for Geralt before Ciri takes the protagonist chair in The Witcher 4 and its trilogy. Somehow, CDPR hopes to have all three games in this new saga shipped within six years of each other, which would be quite a feat indeed, even if the company wasn't also juggling Cyberpunk 2 and multiple other projects. Cyberpunk 2 won't repeat the production mistakes of Cyberpunk 2077, studio veteran Adrian Fulneczek said, stressing that the company has "learned our lesson."
