Ubisoft: Microsoft and Sony demand PC games to be locked at 30fps

In the recent months Ubisoft and some other video game developers have received a lot of criticism for decisions to lock their games at 30 frames per second on all platforms. During a recent question and answer session with students in a college a game architect from Ubisoft implied that the company locks its games at 30fps because developers of game consoles force it to do so.

Disclaimer: Bare in mind that we can't confirm the legitimacy of the information in this Reddit thread. This is all very subjective information and should be treated as rumor rather than fact. Take everything you read with a pinch of salt. 

On Tuesday an engineering team consisting of a game architect, an online programmer and a human resource specialist visited a school to explain their work to students. During the question and answer session one of the students asked the specialists numerous questions and posted answers to reddit. Some of the responses were somewhat different from the answers given earlier by some other employees of Ubisoft.

For high-end action games like Assassin’s Creed game developers have to “choose between graphical fidelity and smoothness”, according to the game architect. Given that the new-generation video game consoles have relatively limited performance, game developers have to balance resolution, visual effects, fps and other things. As a consequence, some games are rendered in limited resolutions, other titles are locked at 30fps. Given that game consoles have always had limited resources, compromises for them are natural things.

What is surprising is that, according to the architect, platform holders like Microsoft Corp. and Sony Corp. ask game designers to lock fps on PC versions of games, essentially eliminating one of the key advantages that PCs have over consoles: considerably higher performance.

Ubisoft yet has to confirm the information that it had been asked by platform holders to lock fps on all platforms, however, if the information is correct and the practice will continue, we will likely see loads of video games with locked fps in the coming years. This will naturally harm the market of PC hardware in general. If there is no difference between high-end and mainstream AMD Radeon or Nvidia GeForce graphics cards, it makes no sense for the end-user to get a better graphics adapter or a better microprocessor.

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KitGuru Says: It is pretty clear that while both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are considerably more powerful than their predecessors, they are not as powerful as modern mainstream personal computers. Eliminating one of the main advantages that the PCs have over consoles naturally make the latter look slightly better and keep many gamers on these platforms. However, it does not seem too ethical to leave PC gamers without experience they can have just to keep Microsoft and Sony happy…

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