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Google, Stadia planning ‘digital’ dev summit after GDC’s coronavirus postponement

On Friday afternoon, the Game Developers Conference was officially postponed. A seperate Google for Games Developer Summit — featuring Stadia — set to coincide with GDC will now be a “digital experience” in light of the coronavirus.

Google has hosted its own summit at GDC for the past several years focussing on Android games and Cloud services. With the grand unveil of Stadia in 2019, it grew to incorporate the streaming platform. The 2020 edition was set to kickoff on Monday, March 16 with a keynote featuring various teams across the company.

It would have been followed by a full day of sessions related to Android development and leveraging Google Cloud offerings. Stadia specific events were set to take place the day after and featured talks like:

  • Bringing Destiny to Stadia: A GDC Postmortem
  • Bringing Vulkan Graphics Into the Mainstream
  • Mastering Cloud Gaming: Tales from Stadia’s Launch
  • Bringing Google’s Machine Learning to Game Development
  • Super Charge Your Game’s Discoverability
  • The Journey of Bringing Our Unity Game to Stadia

Google this evening says it’s “supportive of the decision made by organizers to postpone GDC 2020” in response to the evolving coronavirus situation. That conference is now supposed to take place over the summer, but Google looks to be going ahead with announcements in the short-term. Plans will be detailed in the “coming weeks” and developers are able to sign-up for updates today.

Although we won’t see you in person, our teams have exciting news to share and we hope you will join us for our digital experience to learn more.

This “digital experience” comes as the company already had plans to livestream both days on YouTube. Google should be well-equipped to provide sessions online, but then again the value of a conference is often making in-person relationships.

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Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com