The Game Developers Conference scheduled for March 16-20 in San Francisco has been postponed after many top game publishing companies withdrew over fear of the spread of the novel coronavirus, event organizer Informa announced on Friday.
"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," the organizer said in a statement on its website. "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."
The cancellation of the event comes after Microsoft, Amazon, Electronic Arts, Facebook, PlayStation, Epic Games, Hideo Kojima and several others withdrew their participation in the conference over concerns surrounding the virus. GDC is the most recent in a slew of gaming and esports events around the world being canceled, halted or postponed due to the coronavirus.
On Friday, Capcom announced it would remove events in Belgium, New Jersey and California from the Capcom Pro Tour in order to protect the safety of its players and fans. The League of Legends Pro League in China, the largest domestic esports league in the world, will resume playing games online March 9 after a several-week halt to competition.
On Thursday, Jaroslaw Wieczorek, governor of the Polish region of Silesia, revoked the license for ESL to host a live audience at the Spodek Arena in Katowice for this weekend's playoffs of the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and StarCraft II. In tech, other events such as the Mobile World Congress and Facebook's F8 conference were canceled. PlayStation also withdrew from showcasing its titles at PAX East in Boston this weekend, citing concerns around the spread of the virus.
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As of Friday, there were more than 85,000 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, named COVID-19, across the world, according to a map created by John Hopkins' Center for Systems Science and Engineering. Of those, 64 have been confirmed within the United States. On Friday, a second case of unknown origin was confirmed in Santa Clara County, California, according to health officials in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first of unknown origin in Northern California was discovered in Solano County, just outside of Sacramento.
The coronavirus is believed to have originated in the Wuhan province of China and has spread rapidly across that country -- reaching a total of 79,250 cases there. The virus has resulted in 2,919 deaths worldwide.