This year's Game Developers Conference has been delayed due to health concerns.
The organizers of GDC have announced that the conference will no longer take place in March. The event was supposed to take place March 16th to 20th in San Francisco, but will be delayed due to health concerns involving COVID-19, also known as the coronavirus. A "GDC event" will be scheduled to take place sometime this summer. The following statment was released by the organizers of GDC (via Polygon):
"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 connect 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."
The news of GDC's cancellation came soon after a large number of companies stated that they would no longer be participating in the event. This includes companies such as Activision, Epic, and Microsoft. Companies such as Sony and Kojima Productions had cancelled their plans to attend GDC in the past few weeks. The organizers of the conference had stated that they would continue on with the event until today.
More than 80,000 cases of COVID-19 have been reported around the world, many of which center in China, where the virus is thought to have originated. South Korea has seen an increase in infections, with 977 cases. The virus has spread to more than 30 countries around the world, including Italy, which has seen more than 300 cases of the virus.
