TwitchCon San Diego has become the latest major video game event to be canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
TwitchCon said that it has decided to cancel the event because of “restrictions on large gatherings and ongoing concerns for the health and safety of our community,” according to a tweet Thursday.
Amazon-0wned Twitch had planned to hold TwitchCon San Diego between September 25 and September 27. The company had also planned an event in Amsterdam, appropriately called TwitchCon Amsterdam, but canceled that event in March because of the pandemic.
Twitch holds two TwitchCon events each year, where the platform’s users and others can come together for meet-and-greets, esports tournaments, live gaming, and more. It’s usually held over a weekend, with a variety of events throughout the three-day stretch. Twitch also usually uses its event to announce new features.
Twitch held its first TwitchCon at the Moscone Center in San Francisco in 2015 with an audience of around 20,000 people. Last year’s TwitchCon San Diego had 28,000 attendees.
Of course, Twitch’s decision to cancel the event wasn’t necessarily a surprise. Other major gaming events, including the E3 gaming expo that had been slated for June, was canceled because of the pandemic. Sports and other live events, including SXSW and countless others, have also been shelved. Even though TwitchCon was scheduled for September, no public health experts expect major live events with tens of thousands of people attending to be allowed anytime soon.
But that doesn’t mean that TwitchCon won’t happen in some form later this year. In fact, Twitch said that it’s trying to come up with plans for an alternative to TwitchCon it can still celebrate in 2020.
“We are gutted that we won’t be able to see all of you in person to connect and show you what we’ve been creating for you over the past year,” Twitch said in a tweet. “While we can’t gather in person, we’re exploring ways that we could join forces in an alternate dimension later this year. We’ll keep you posted.”
While it’s unclear what that “alternate dimension” might mean for Twitch, most companies, including Microsoft, Sony, and EA, have turned to livestreams to keep making announcements.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.