Microsoft and Epic Games Pull out of GDC Because of Coronavirus

The coronavirus has officially escalated from a problem to a full-blown pandemic as countries and organizations around the world struggle to keep this occasionally deadly and very dangerous disease contained before it mutates into something extremely deadly and apocalyptically dangerous. Not helping those efforts are large public gatherings where the disease could potentially spread, which is why it’s becoming common practice for studios and publishers to withdraw from said gatherings.

Which is exactly what’s happening to GDC, otherwise known as Game Developers Conference, otherwise-otherwise known as a large public gathering, as both Microsoft and Epic Games have decided to pull out of the show.

Microsoft has said this:

“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.”

They’re also going to cancel their ID@Xbox event, which was usually on-display adjacent to the event.

Meanwhile, Epic Games tweeted this:

“Regrettably, uncertainty around health concerns has made it unviable to send our employees, and so we have made the difficult decision to withdraw attendance.”

Both of them plan to use the power of the internet to stream all the information and reveals they were saving for the event, so we’re not exactly going to miss out on anything, but it does leave GDC itself missing two of their keynote presenters. But given how the disease is spreading rapidly, even though no cases of it have shown up in San Francisco so far, this seems like a fairly common sense measure.

In any case, GDC has announced that despite these pull-outs and broader concerns, the event will continue more-or-less as planned. There’s still time to change that, however, if the virus becomes too big of a concern or too many people pull out.

I’ll keep an eye out.