Kojima Productions has unfortunately canceled their appearance at GDC, the Game Developers Conference, in light of the Coronavirus outbreak. They’re the latest developer to cancel due to the coronavirus after Facebook Oculus and PlayStation.
Kojima Productions has made the difficult decision to cancel our participation at the 2020 Game Developers Conference due to increasing concerns related to coronavirus. (1/2)https://t.co/K6FJtq5Tpx
— KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS (Eng) (@KojiPro2015_EN) February 24, 2020
An official statement on Twitter confirms that they won’t be attending, which also means that Hideo Kojima’s design philosophy session on Death Stranding has been canceled. Joining the cancelation is a session from Eric Johnson, the AI Programmer of Kojima Productions, called Death Stranding: An AI Postmortem. Needless to say, GDC has gotten a little less interesting with the absence of these two sessions.
Fear of the coronavirus has had a huge effect on the industry so far, including the outright cancellation of the Mobile World Congress, Nintendo Switch shortages in Japan, and a shortage of Valve’s Index VR headsets.
The GDC is set to run from March 16th to the 20th in San Francisco, CA.