The Game Developers Conference is an annual conference for video game developers where developers from all over the world come and showcase their upcoming games or improvements to the world.
The Game Developers Conference for 2020 was scheduled for March 16-20 but after many developers and publishers withdrew over concerns of the spread of the COVID-19 (novel coronavirus), event organizer announced on Friday announced that the event has been postponed indefinitely.
In a statement on GDC’s official website, the organizers said:
“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.”
The news of event cancellation comes just hours after some more companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Bethesda, and Gearbox announced their official withdrawal from the event. The spread of COVID-19 is still at large with WHO recently raising the alert level of the virus to highest. Many countries have started to lockdown their borders and initiating extensive scanning procedures to keep the virus from spreading. As of Friday, there have been more than 85,000 confirmed cases of the Novel Coronavirus worldwide and a close to 2919 deaths have been reported.
With the growing concern around the world about the virus, the GDC organizers committee isn’t shocking and was expected. Even if they went on with the event, many big names would remain missing and the event would result in failure either way. GDC is the latest in the list of events being called off due to concerns over the spread of the virus.
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