Ubisoft had a few of its staff visit a school to explain their work, with some truly interesting things revealed about the company who thinks 60FPS 'looks weird'. Someone asked the Ubisoft employees "what the hell happened with Watch Dogs", to which the Ubisoft employee, who was the 'Online Programmer' said that just before they release a game, they have to send a copy to console manufacturers, who tell them what to keep in the game, and what to take out.
But it gets better: the Game Architect said that they always try to aim for 60FPS, but due to "limitations", they have been settling at 30FPS for their latest games. He continued, saying that console makers are pressuring them into doing the same thing on PC. The Game Architect continued, saying that Ubisoft reuses as much code as possible, which could explain the similarities between a few of their games.
Someone else asked if the company was "aware of the negative responses of the recent decision to lock your games into 30FPS. If so, what do you think about that?". The Game Architect said that on consoles, and especially for something like Assassin's Creed: Unity, they have to choose between graphic fidelity and smoothness. 'timois', who made the thread on Reddit, said that "he implied that MS is making them lock the framerate on PC too".
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/40591...-pressuring-them-into-30fps-for-pc/index.html
Why not linking to the original Reddit post that at least has "proof" photos in it, as well as an announcement beforehand to collect questions? http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2j7r9j/delivering_ubisoft_came_to_my_school_for_a/
School attendee update:
Just a lurker here, but I just happen to be a student at this school and I attended this conference yesterday. Quite surprised to see a thread about it on GAF !
School's name is Grenoble INP Ensimag, one of, if not the, best schools in applied maths and computer science in France (wiki).
Every tuesday, students can attend 2 or 3 conferences organized by various companies. Here is the list from last year (here), dunno why it hasn't been updated yet, but you can see Ubisoft also came here last December, should be a solid proof (btw these are not the same presenters, and I'm not going to reveal their names publicly).
Anyway, I can confirm everything said on Reddit was said during the conference, it was interesting to learn more on game development, and I was most surprised to learn that Ubisoft has to wait for Sony & Microsoft review and how they can change things before they release the game.
Edit : btw, i'm not the one who took the pic.
I replied only to confirm that the conference DID take place, because I don't like to read that some people are doubting it or even my school's existence (that is what convinced me to reply in fact), but things go REALLY too far here, it was just a one-hour conference to show us engineer's jobs at Ubisoft, and because the engineers may not be experts at speaking in a conference, things they said can be easily misinterpretated.