The organizers of the Game Developers Conference announced on Friday, February 28 that the 2020 show will be rescheduled. This shifts the dates of GDC 2020 from March 16 - March 20, 2020 to an unspecified time in the Summer. This announcement comes after numerous studios withdrew their plans to attend the annual trade show event. These studios all cited a growing fear of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and a desire to keep their employees, friends, and fans safe and healthy.
An official statement from the GDC organizers was made on the official GDC website. I have included their statement below in case their site fails to load.
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.
For more information, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page.
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.
For more information, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page.
Event officials also say that they will try to make "many of the presentations that would have been given at GDC 2020 available for free online." Speakers that were scheduled to have talks at the event can optionally submit their talks in a video format. These videos would then be distributed via the official GDC YouTube channel and as a part of the GDC Vault.
