Going Big With The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt at gamescom 2026

“We are so back” — this was my immediate thought when I arrived in Cologne, Germany, on August 24, 2026, and went to the Koelnmesse fairgrounds to check out how CD PROJEKT RED’s gamescom booths were coming together in the final hours before the show. The last time we were at gamescom with booths in both the entertainment area (meant for all attendees) and the business area (meant for industry professionals) was in 2019, when we were showcasing Cyberpunk 2077. This year, we came back to present what’s coming next for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

What gamescom attendees were already looking forward to ahead of the show was Songs of the Past, the upcoming third expansion, which we are developing together with Fool’s Theory. We had announced its gameplay showcases in Cologne a few months earlier, but there was one more surprise we saved for gamescom Opening Night Live. As over 5,000 people gathered on-site, and more than a million online, we revealed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, an upgraded version of our critically acclaimed role-playing game coming to PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and, for the first time, Nintendo Switch 2. Our partner for this release is Yigsoft — the company that previously worked with us on The Witcher 3 REDkit modding tool and Cyberpunk 2077 post-launch updates.

On the gamescom Opening Night Live stage, host Geoff Keighley welcomed our own Miles Tost to chat about both upcoming projects. Miles is a Witcher 3 veteran and currently Level Design Lead on The Witcher 4, and it was great to hear his conversation met with audible excitement from the live audience. Moments like these, hearing that reaction, was genuinely humbling.

Image Credit: gamescom on YouTube

And that was just the beginning of gamescom, with five full days still to come. Our entertainment area booth, open to all attendees, was the largest in CD PROJEKT RED’s history. Themed after Songs of the Past, it featured large-scale statues of some of the expansion's never-before-seen monsters, while at its center stood a behind-closed-doors auditorium where developers presented back-to-back live gameplay demos. Each presentation hosted a group of around 150 attendees — thank you all for waiting in line to see our game! Between August 26 and 30, we welcomed around 9,000 guests across 60 presentations.

Our entertainment area booth also featured a state-of-the-art livestreaming space where we hosted over 40 hours of REDstreams throughout the show. Live programming included gameplay from both Songs of the Past and Remastered, alongside appearances from developers from CD PROJEKT RED, Fool’s Theory, and Yigsoft, and even interviews with cast members such as Doug Cockle and John Schwab, who voice Geralt of Rivia and Dandelion, respectively.

Last but not least, we also brought our official merch store to gamescom, featuring a new apparel collection themed after Songs of the Past. All in all, a lot was going on in our entertainment area space, and we’re thankful to all our visitors for their enthusiasm and candid feedback.

Our CD PROJEKT RED booth in the business area was also in full swing. There, press and content creators arrived to see their own gameplay showcases of Songs of the Past, with over 1,500 guests in attendance over three days. While all this was happening, developers from CD PROJEKT RED and Fool’s Theory also took part in numerous interviews with media outlets from around the world.

Beyond our upcoming The Witcher 3 releases, our business booth also premiered CD PROJEKT RED’s refreshed visual identity. In a way, the work behind this goes all the way back to 1994, when CD PROJEKT was founded. The company wasn’t RED yet, at this time, and its founders weren’t thinking about game development. They started out as video game distributors, focusing exclusively on titles available on CD-ROMs — hence the “CD” in the company name. At the time, it was the first distribution model of its kind in Poland.

I once heard Marcin Iwiński, one of those two co-founders, say: “CD-ROMs were a breakthrough — a single one could fit 450 3.5-inch floppy disks.” Typical computer games in the early ’90s came on just a handful of such disks, so the arrival of the CD-ROM was a huge technological leap. Yet not every company jumped on board immediately.

In 2002, when CD PROJEKT established its game development studio, it added the RED suffix as a nod to the place where it all started. CD PROJEKT RED was originally based in the Polish city of Łódź before moving to Warsaw where the main CD PROJEKT company was based. Łódź is known for its industrial landscape, featuring many 19th-century red-brick buildings, which also inspired the first version of the CD PROJEKT RED logo.

Many years later, in 2014, we started using the Raróg as a symbol of our company — a legendary firebird featured in Slavic mythology. This new identity reinforced CD PROJEKT RED’s connection to its Slavic roots ahead of the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt the following year.

And at gamescom 2026, as we geared up to send Geralt of Rivia on a new adventure in the upcoming Songs of the Past expansion, it felt like the right time to give our visual identity a little refresh. Our business area booth at gamescom was a clear statement of that. Even from a distance, you could distinguish its striking red color. It was all-caps RED, just like our company name.

This year’s gamescom welcomed 368,000 visitors from 131 countries across 233,000 square meters of gross exhibition space. Along with the rest of the CD PROJEKT RED team, I’m happy that we took some of that to showcase what’s coming next for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The response to both Songs of the Past and Remastered was incredibly encouraging, and receiving three gamescom awards was another sign of that enthusiasm. Songs of the Past and Remastered were recognized as the Best Announcement at gamescom Opening Night Live, while the giveaways we prepared for showcase attendees received the Best Merch Award. Finally, we were honored to receive the Best Booth Award for our entertainment area space.

All of that gives us a lot of motivation to keep working on these upcoming projects. And when I think back to my first reaction to visiting gamescom this year, I guess my immediate reaction was quite accurate after all.

We are so back. And it feels great.