The developer-focused sessions include a bunch of talks on accessibility in games (like Gears 5), some info on Project xCloud, and there’s even a talk from Rare about Sea Of Thieves (which, naturally, I’m unreasonably excited about). “Come learn about the latest cloud and game development technologies from Microsoft, go behind the scenes with the creators at Xbox Game Studios and the ID@Xbox program, and level up with deep technical talks and panel discussions led by industry leaders,” Microsoft say. All of Microsoft’s talks will be streamed on Mixer starting from 10am PT (5pm GMT) on March 17th, with more following on the 18th. You can check out the full schedule on their blog. They’ve been planning to show panels like this since they dropped out of this year’s GDC due to coronavirus worries. Unity seem to have something in the works to make their presentations available online, too. Microsoft mentioned in a previous post that all this would be “streamed live and available on demand”, so even if you miss the live stuff you should still be able to catch up with everything you want to hear. GDC’s organisers are looking to sort out a GDC event for “later this summer”, and they also plan to “make many of the presentations that would have been given at GDC 2020 available for free online”. They haven’t released any details yet of when either of these things will be, but we’ll keep you up to date when we know more.
