Both Sony and Facebook announced that they will not be attending the annual Game Developer Conference in San Fransisco next month. They say that this announcement is coming with related reasoning to the recently renamed Coronavirus, COVID-19.
The GDC is historically where companies will go to announce their latest advancements in gaming and how it ties into their consumer-focused plans. This is usually a stepping stone. Facebook says they still plan on showing what they have been working on, despite not showing up this year. Sony, on the other hand, hasn’t said anything about if they will be releasing or announcing anything soon.
“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,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We still plan to share the exciting announcements we had planned for the show through videos, online Q&As, and more, and will plan to host GDC partner meetings remotely in the coming weeks. We continue to collaborate with UBM, GDC’s parent company, and our partners, and thank them for their efforts.”
Sony is taking the same approach, but we aren’t so sure about what they plan to do next.
“We have made the difficult decision to cancel our participation in Game Developers Conference due to increasing concerns related to COVID-19 (also known as coronavirus). We felt this was the best option as the situation related to the virus and global travel restrictions are changing daily,” the company told GamesIndustry.biz. “We are disappointed to cancel our participation, but the health and safety of our global workforce is our highest concern. We look forward to participating in GDC in the future.”
We saw Vive announce their biggest release of the year with the new Cosmos series. You can expect Sony and Facebook to do something similar, as they likely won’t be throwing a keynote together anytime soon.
COVID-19 first was found in Wuhan, China, back at the end of 2019. Even though over 99% of the cases have been confined to mainland China, many companies are being overly cautious. Facebook hasn’t shipped out a Quest since the outbreak, and many others are following the same trend.
With that being said, we are excited to see what hardware and software updates these two tech giants have in store for us. Sony and Oculus are the best at what they do. This is an exciting time for virtual reality. For more VR news and community updates, make sure to check back at VRGear.com.
