GDC Coronavirus Survey

I distributed an informal, non-scientific survey to a number of people to quantify what others in the game industry are planning to do this year in response to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. Here’s what the data currently tells us:

A lot of people have cited the international nature of the event as an area of particular concern. Unlike local events (e.g., PAX East, which is largely attended by people living in the Northeast), people expect that GDC will be attended from developers from all over the world. And it seems this belief is warranted. Here’s where people in my survey say they are coming from:

With nearly 40% of people coming from overseas, it is difficult to know exactly what risks everyone is being exposed to. Here is the the distribution of the types of people who responded to the survey:

I also asked for random comments. These tend to fall into a few categories.

First, there are people who commented about the risk simply being too high, or hoping that the event is simply formally canceled or postponed:

• “Please cancel GDC.”
• “Cancel it. Not worth the risk.”
• “Please cancel and postpone it. It’s the only responsible thing to do.”
• “GDC organizer is putting everyone’s health at risk! Please cancel it.”
• “GDC should be canceled.”
• “It’s a safety issue. We should not put attendees at risk.”
• “I’m sure that I’m scared…more than GDC, it’s the flight which is scaring me. Such closed environment n what if someone is infected.”
• “People are panicking. GDC should offer to honour all commitments and just move the event 6 months or so down into the year…”
• “Please cancel this event. It’s not worth the risk to some of the brightest brains of the world.”
• “Post-pone the event to summer if possible, even in different city (similar to what Taipei Game Show did, moving it to August)”
• “CANCEL GDC FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND.”
• “People before profit. With the US response team cut we cannot wait for our government. We the people have to take action. We need to stop all international conventions for one month.”

That said, there are a handful of people who are highly skeptical of everyone’s reasoning:

• “It’s sad to see so much irrational decision making about attendance.”
• “COVID is fake!”
• “Companies are massively overreacting, given the facts on the ground from the CDC”

And there are people who sound like they plan to go, and expect the decrease in attendance to be an advantage:

• “Hey, if all the big studios pull out it’ll be an indie-mazing GDC.”
• “At least SF will be less crowded for GDC time this year”

There are a couple people who also wonder why we aren’t running this as a virtual conference, using technology:

• “Time for a virtual conference”
• “Seems like if there ever was an event that could use tech as alternative to in person, given circumstances, it’s GDC.”

I will continue to collect data between now and Sunday, March 1. If you’d like to be included in the results, please complete the survey here.