While the past few weeks several companies had already bowed out, today numerous others, such as Activision, Blizzard and Gearbox, announced they will not be attending GDC 2020 due to the coronavirus threat.

As such the GDC organization has decided to postpone this year's convention until a later date, but with E3 coming up soon, as well as a variety of other conventions such as PAX, Tokyo Game Show, or Comic-Con, it begs the question when they could possibly reschedule it to, if the location itself is even available.

"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 .

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. We will be working with our partners to finalize the details and will share more information about our plans in the coming weeks."

In order to allow our conference speakers to still participate in the event, we are intending to make many of the presentations that would have been given at GDC 2020 available for free online. After speakers (optionally) contribute their talks in video format, they will be distributed on the GDC YouTube channel and the free part of GDC Vault.

With regards to the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards, the oganization intends to stream a set of these GDC 2020 talks and the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards via Twitch during the week that the event would have taken place in San Francisco (March 16th to 20th), so that they community can continue to honor & celebrate its best games.