The Coronavirus pandemic has been causing devastating effects on the world and the video game industry. As more cities and even countries doing quarantine to prevent the virus from spreading further - an unprecedented number of cancellations and delays have been announced. From E3, GDC to various tournaments of League, Dota 2 and PUBG, everything is getting canceled left and right.
The LOL tournaments that were just postponed were the European LEC and the North American LCS, with further plans to monitor and reevaluate every week, based on the situation of the disease. This might even affect the World if the situation remains unchanged.
The Apex Global Series was supposed to be held this weekend as well, with half a million dollars prize pool distributed to players. However, due to the outbreak in the host country, Britain, with over fifteen thousand cases estimated. All EA events in various countries have been postponed indefinitely for the time being. This announcement means that the FIFA and Madden franchises are going to be stuck.
The PS5 and Xbox Series X are in serious trouble too, on both hardware and software sides. While their scheduled launch date, holiday this year, is still quite a while away, if the Coronavirus lasts for a few more months, things could easily get worse. With a lot of their components outsourced to other countries like China and Taiwan, places that are heavily affected by the virus, it would be hard-pressed to create enough copies for a worldwide release. The production of smartphones has also been limiting parts manufacture.
On the software side, while only a few games have announced the postponement, the biggest titles of the year might easily follow suit. Future releases would also be affected as well, with various developers like Nintendo suspending operations.
Overall, it looks like we are not going to get much video game events or anything at all until the virus problem is resolved. For details about how the Coronavirus affected the industry giants like Nintendo, Microsoft, Ubisoft... please check out this post.