GDC 2020 delayed due to coronavirus outbreak

The organizers of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) send out word that this year's edition will no longer take place in March. The conference was supposed to take place on March 12-16 in San Francisco, but due to a high number of cancellations the event is now postponed to "sometime this summer".

The official statement from GDC doesn't mention the coronavirus outbreak by name but that's indeed the culprit here. Recently, it was reported that Amazon, Epic, Microsoft, and Unity all decided to skip the event. Some of the presentations that were supposed to be given at GDC will now be livestreamed via the Internet.

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.

The Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona was also cancelled due to the coronavirus.