Coronavirus Update: Game Developers Conference 2020 Postponed Because Of COVID-19

Some of the largest tech events have been canceled or postponed due to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. Game Developers Conference (GDC), a big event for video game designers and programmers, has been postponed.

GDC was scheduled for March 16, 2020, in San Francisco. The organizers have not shared a new date in the statement. According to the statement released by GDC, the partners and organizers in the game development industry consulted and decided to postpone the upcoming event.

GDC’s Official Statement After Postponing The Event

“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.”

In 2019, 29,000 people were a part of the conference, CNBC reported. Facebook, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft announced that they would not participate in the conference this year due to coronavirus.

Facebook stated on Thursday that the annual F8 developer's conference over concerns about the coronavirus. The conference was slated to take place in McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California on May 5 and 6.

This is Facebook’s second event that has been canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier, it canceled the Global Marketing Summit that was scheduled for March this year.

Other tech events that are canceled so far are EmTech Asia that was scheduled in Singapore, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Shopify Unite, an annual Shopify developer conference in Toronto and Google News Initiative Global Summit in Sunnyvale, California.

Apart from tech events, leaders have advised against holding any big event. Japan Times reported that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced a nationwide school closure from Monday, March 2. The announcement came after the number of confirmed coronavirus cases kept increasing in the country.

The current coronavirus death toll stands at 2,867 with 427 new confirmed cases in China. The number of new cases across the world is 84,124.