The Coronavirus disease has been doing the rounds since December 2019. The current outbreak originated in Wuhan, China but has since and somehow managed to make its way beyond the realms of the country. The infection is spread through human-to-human transmission via the likes of sneezes and coughs.
On account of the Coronavirus outbreak, many studios and companies have decided to opt out of attending the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC 2020). GDC 2020 will be taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California (in the United States) from March 16th - March 20th.
Facebook and Sony PlayStation were first to the punch. The former wrote the following in a statement in regards to their decision to not attend GDC:
"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."
Similarly, Sony wrote about valuing the wellbeing of their employees:
"We are disappointed to cancel our participation, but the health and safety of our global workforce is our highest concern." Kojima Productions followed suit and provided a similar statement via their official website — which you can read below (via
PC Gamer):
"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."
Of the 53 cases of COVID-19 within the United States, 15 of them were in California. So, the concern is certainly warranted — especially given how crowded and unsanitary conventions of this sort tend to be. Most recently, Electronic Arts decided to opt out of GDC 2020. Earlier today, the company provided their statement on the matter — you can check out that below.
Having closely followed the global situation with Coronavirus and with the recent escalation of cases in new regions, we have decided to take additional steps to protect the wellbeing of our employees including the restriction of all non-essential travel. As a result we are also cancelling our 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.
This isn't the first time the current Coronavirus outbreak has affected the video games industry. Nintendo recently declared that the outbreak could spell trouble for Nintendo Switch stock during the coming months —
find out more on that here. The Outer Worlds for the Nintendo Switch was delayed indefinitely on account of the disease —
as you can see here.