EA is now suspending all of its live esports events as coronavirus cases continue to rise around the world, according to GamesRadar.
Live EA games events have now been officially suspended until further notice by the Redwood City company. It’s all in an effort to “limit the spread of the coronavirus pandemic" as well as protect not only the competitors, but also employees and the gaming community, amidst growing coronavirus concerns.
These live events include the Apex Legends Global Series, Madden NFL 20 Championship Series, EA Sports FIFA 20 Global Series and the FIFA Online 4 Live Events. Third-party events running under license from EA are suspended as well.
According to the EA website, the company will “continue to monitor the situation around the coronavirus and receive updated guidance from health officials around the world, we will use this time to determine next steps for moving forward with all of EA’s Competitive Gaming live events and online broadcasts.”
The suspension, however, doesn’t apply to “online events, where participants and staff are remote and separated" so there's a bit of good news.
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Coronavirus sweeping across the globe
While the number of the novel coronavirus infections seems to be slowing down in places like China and South Korea, it’s only gaining momentum in other parts of the world. Italy is now on lockdown and Spain soon will be as well, while countries like the US and Turkey are banning all flights to/from many European countries.
In fact, COVID-19 has swept across Europe like wildfire in the last few days, clobbering many industries from tourism to tech along the way.
The tech world is definitely one of the several industries to take the brunt of the hit, with factories shutting down, supplies depleting, sales declining, and many events and conferences either being cancelled or switched to online only.
The EA live esports events are only the latest in the growing list of tech events that met their demise this year, following the cancellations of MWC 2020 in Barcelona, Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2020 in San Francisco and E3 2020 in Los Angeles.
