Update #1: Microsoft announced on 28th February at 2:52am (which is probably the late morning in the US) that it will no longer be attending this year’s GDC due to growing health risks posed by the Coronavirus.

The company will be hosting livestreamed versions of most of its planned GDC panels as reparations, including its Xbox Series X hardware showcase and Project xCloud streaming. 

Update #2: Unity, a renowned game engine maker that currently helps a heckaton of indie devs, will be pulling out of this year’s GDC due to health concerns. Again, this begs the question: without one of the world’s biggest game engine maker, are people still interested in going to GDC 2020 anymore? 

Original story

Hideo Kojima’s Kojima Productions and several companies have announced that they will be missing this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2020 due to Covid-19 fears.

As PC Gamer reported, Kojima Productions, Sony, Facebook, and EA have decided to pull out from the event, which is to take place between 16 March and 20 March 2020.

A statement on the Kojima Productions website reads:

“Kojima Productions has made the difficult decision to cancel our participation at the 2020 Game Developers Conference due to increasing concerns related to novel coronavirus.

Although much-anticipated, unfortunately this cancellation also includes Hideo Kojima’s session on the 19th and Eric Johnson’s session on the 16th.”

Sony told GamesIndustry.biz that:

“We have made the difficult decision to cancel our participation in Game Developers Conference due to increasing concerns related to COVID-19 (also known as coronavirus).

We are disappointed to cancel our participation, but the health and safety of our global workforce is our highest concern.

We look forward to participating in GDC in the future.”

Facebook gave a similar statement to the site,  saying that “out of concern for the health and safety of our employees, our dev partners, and the GDC community, Facebook will not be attending this year’s Game Developer Conference due to the evolving public health risks related to COVID-19”.

Although they won’t be present at GDC 2020, Facebook also told GamesIndustry.biz that they “still plan to share the exciting announcements we had planned for the show through videos, online Q&As, and more, and will plan to host GDC partner meetings remotely in the coming weeks”.

Meanwhile, EA told PC Gamer that due to the recent rise of Covid-19 cases, they are cancelling “official participation at GDC and limiting attendance to other events”.

“We are continuing to monitor the situation and will adjust guidelines to our employees as we feel is appropriate,” they added.