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Update, 4:15 p.m. PT: The organizers of GDC 2020 have published a new FAQ on its site and on Twitter regarding GDC's postponing. Registrants to the conference and expo will be getting emails about their registration status, and offered full refunds.

In addition, those who made hotel reservations within GDC room blocks won't have to pay penalties or additional fees. As for the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival Awards, they will still commence on the week of Mar. 16, when GDC 2020 was originally set to take place, only now it will be livestreamed just on Twitch. Some presentations that were originally planned to be given at GDC 2020 will also be made available for free online, though it's unclear how many of them will.

You can find the full FAQ above, and the original article follows below:

Game Developers Conference 2020 has officially been postponed to later this summer. The confirmation came today after even more companies pulled out of the event, joining the ongoing exodus from throughout the week.

GDC's organizers released the following statement:

After close consultation with our partners in the game development industry and community around the world, we've made the difficult decision to postpone the Game Developers Conference this March.



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.

Sony and Facebook were the first to withdraw from this year's Game Developers Conference due to the ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak across the world. In the week after, more companies followed. Kojima Productions. Iron Galaxy. Electronic Arts. And yesterday, Microsoft, Unity, and Epic Games all withdrew from the convention, in addition to Amazon and Activision-Blizzard early this morning. And that's just the big names.

The annual conference, which is held in San Francisco, is one of the biggest gaming conferences in the world. Last year, the week-long conference had its highest attendance ever, with 29,000 people from across the industry and world in attendance. The conference is also host to the annual Game Developers Choice Awards and the Independent Games Festival Awards. This year, Death Stranding and the adventure game Mutazione lead each award show, respectively, in nominations. Adventure game pioneer Roberta Williams is set to receive this year's Pioneer Award at GDCA.

While there are no reported cases in San Francisco, the city officially declared a state of emergency in response to the epidemic, citing a desire to be prepared should a more widespread outbreak happen. "To be clear, this declaration of emergency is all about preparedness," San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a press conference on Feb. 25. "By declaring a state of emergency we are prioritizing the safety of our communities by being prepared."

Recently, a woman in Northern California is believed to be the first person in the U.S. to contract the virus without traveling internationally or being in contact with anyone infected. The novel coronavirus has infected more than 83,000 people worldwide and killed over 2,800.