Organizers of GDC 2020 today announced that the conference is now postponed, in the official announcement the committee reveals that they were advised not to host the event. Last week Sony announced that due to Coronavirus’s concern they wouldn’t attend the conference, a domino effect occurred as Kojima Productions, Microsoft, Unreal, Unity, EA, Kowloon Nights, Oculus all recently confirmed that wouldn’t attend to the same reasons exposed by Sony.
After close consultation with our partners in the game development industry and community around the world, we’ve made the difficult decision to postpone the Game Developers Conference this March.
Having spent the past year preparing for the show with our advisory boards, speakers, exhibitors, and event partners, we’re genuinely upset and disappointed not to be able to host you at this time .
We want to thank all our customers and partners for their support, open discussions and encouragement. As everyone has been reminding us, great things happen when the community comes together and connects at GDC. For this reason, we fully intend to host a GDC event later in the summer. We will be working with our partners to finalize the details and will share more information about our plans in the coming weeks.
GDC organizers are planning to host many of the presentations that would taken place at the conference via YouTube on the official GDC channel. The Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards will be streamed via Twitch during the week that the event would have taken place in San Francisco (March 16th to 20th).
The outbreak of the Coronavirus is already taking a toll on the gaming industry, Nintendo was the first gaming company to talk about the possibilities of the virus seriously affecting Nintendo. Nintendo of Japan President, Shuntaro Furukawa talked about how the deadly virus is already affecting the production of Nintendo Switch and its Lite version. According to ComicBook’s reports the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X might be delayed due to the epidemic of Coronavirus in China. The outlet analyze the situation and there are high chances that the production if not delayed might have problems with meet the demands at retail stores or maybe even worst, shipping enough units to pre-order buyers.
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