Xbox Game Pass Loses A 10/10 Open World Masterpiece On August 31

You have until August 31, 2026. After that, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Complete Edition is off Xbox Game Pass, and the only way back into Velen is your own wallet.

It’s the kind of departure that stings more than the usual monthly cleanout. Games rotate off Game Pass constantly, licenses expire, Xbox decides something isn’t worth holding onto, and most of the time the casualties are older titles or ones players stopped caring about years ago. Every so often, though, a genuine pillar of the medium vanishes without much explanation.

Six months on the service, and that’s it

Here’s the part that makes the timing look strange. The Complete Edition only arrived on Game Pass back in February 2026. That’s roughly half a year on the service before the exit.

CD Projekt Red is still supporting the game a decade later. There’s an upcoming Witcher 3 DLC in the works. And the version with everything bundled in is walking out the door right before that.

If you started a playthrough, the math isn’t kind. Even a focused run at the base campaign is a commitment, and the notion that you’ll clear the DLC too in whatever days you have left is optimistic at best.

This has happened before

The Witcher 3 has already done a lap through Game Pass and back out again. The base game joined in 2019, then got pulled in 2021. It returned this past February with the Complete Edition, and now it’s leaving again.

Which invites an obvious read on the situation. It’s altogether possible CD Projekt Red simply wants people buying the game outright when the new DLC lands, and the Complete Edition finds its way back onto Game Pass sometime after that. Nothing about the removal rules that out.

The workaround, if you want one

Losing it doesn’t have to mean losing your save. The Witcher 3 supports cross-save across all platforms, so a copy bought elsewhere picks up exactly where your Game Pass run stopped.

And the price rarely stays high. It goes on sale frequently, often at extremely low prices, so if you spot a steeper discount on PlayStation than on Xbox, buy it there and keep going. Geralt doesn’t care which storefront paid for him.

Something will fill the gap, obviously. New titles arrive as old ones leave, and a handful of highly sought-after games will show up to soften the blow when what plenty of players consider the best RPG on the service disappears. That’s cold comfort if you’re 40 hours deep and staring at a Bloody Baron quest line you haven’t finished.

For a lot of subscribers, this was the reason the subscription existed. Some people signed up for Game Pass specifically to play this. On September 1, they’ll be paying for a service that no longer has it.