It’s a day of tech company cancellations following on from Facebook just confirming F8 2020 will no longer be taking place. Epic Games, Unity Technologies and Microsoft’s Game Stack team have all issued statements announcing their withdrawals from March’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2020.
Over on Unreal Engine’s Twitter account, the company said: “Here at Epic we were excited about participating in GDC 2020. Regrettably, uncertainty around health concerns has made it unviable to send our employees, and so we have made the difficult decision to withdraw attendance.”
Epic Games tends to have a very big presence at GDC, not only with two major stands filled with developers but also its State of Unreal keynote which tends to draw a big crowd.
As for Unity, the company issued a blog post saying:
“Unfortunately, this year, after much thought and deliberation, we have made the difficult decision to pull out of GDC 2020. While we did not make this decision lightly, the current conditions with COVID-19 (also known as Novel Coronavirus) present too much risk. We take our employees’ wellbeing very seriously. We do not want any Unity employee or partner to compromise their health and safety unnecessarily.
“We’re advising all employees to refrain from travelling to GDC. We will no longer have a physical presence with a booth, but will instead showcase the great GDC content we’ve been working towards online.”
Microsoft’s Game Stack team has also taken the same decision, saying: “After a close review of guidance by global health authorities and out of an abundance of caution, we’ve made the difficult decision to withdraw from participating at Game Developers Conference 2020 in San Francisco. The health and safety of players, developers, employees, and our partners around the world is our top priority. Especially as the world is experiencing growing public health risks associated with coronavirus (COVID-19).”
As the image above illustrates, the main hall at GDC is looking more and more empty. Completely understandable in light of the current situation. Yet, at the moment the event is still confirmed to be going ahead. VRFocus will continue to bring you the latest event news as it happens.