Kojima Productions and Hideo Kojima have announced they will not be attending GDC 2020 because of concerns around the Coronavirus. The announcement was made on the studio’s website where a spokesperson from the Death Stranding studio wrote;
RELATED: Ghost of Tsushima Has Been Crafted in Dreams and it is Superb
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#008468″ class=”” size=”21″]”Kojima Productions has made the difficult decision to cancel our participation at the 2020 Game Developers Conference due to increasing concerns related to novel coronavirus. Although much-anticipated, unfortunately, this cancellation also includes Hideo Kojima’s session on the 19th and Eric Johnson’s session on the 16th.”[/perfectpullquote]
According to the event, Hideo Kojima was meant to present a talk at GDC 2020 in regards to the creation of Death Stranding and touch on how the director unravelled the game’s concept, theme, storytelling, game mechanics, development the “connection” as a framework”.
Hideo Kojima and Kojima Productions are not the first people to pull out of GDC due to the Coronavirus. Last week both Sony PlayStation and Facebook announced they would no longer be attending the show. Square Enix also announced changes to their plans due to the virus. Earlier this month, it was also revealed that the upcoming Mobile World Congress waa cancelled this year too due to the threat of the virus.
We don’t know what other impacts the Coronavirus may have on the gaming industry this year but so far things are not looking too great. With the development of games and the production of the next-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles planned for this year, we may see delays across the board due to restrictions across certain countries.
