The 2020 Game Developers Conference (GDC) has been postponed after major participants have cancelled their participation due to the rising cases of coronavirus.
The GDC conference is associated with award shows, Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards. This year, the event was to take place in March 16th-20th but has now been moved summer.
The announcement comes after both Epic Games and Unity. The makers of popular video game engines and other game development tools pulled out of the show on Thursday.
Additionally, Sony, Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, Amazon, and Facebook, including Oculus, also cancelled plans to attend the show, citing health concerns related to the spread of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19.
Some companies had resorted to digital events instead of physical appearance. For example, Microsoft through the Game Stack blog. Announced that they were organizing a similar online-only event on the same dates instead of a physical appearance.
Noting from GDC’s statement about the cancellation.” GDC reached the final decision 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.”
