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Nintendo Joins Khronos Group
jones_supa writes: Gamasutra reports that Nintendo has quietly joined Khronos Group, the consortium managing the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics APIs. The news was brought to Gamasutra's attention by a NeoGaf post, which notes that Nintendo's name was added to the list of Khronos Group contributing members earlier this month. As a Khronos Group contributor Nintendo has full voting rights and is empowered to participate in the group's API development, but it doesn't have a seat on the Khronos Group board and can't participate in the final ratification process of new API specifications.
If by "major players" you're excluding all the AA publishers and dev houses, MS, and nVidia, sure. These players are all about DX.
Being part of the group doesn't mean you want it to succeed, it means you need to know what's going on and to have your input to be heard in the event that it does.
I for one would love DX12 (and Windows 10) to flop, or at least for OpenGL Whatever They Call It Now to succeed as a viable alternative, but I'm not so naive as to believe it will happen.
I still dont know why the desktop is and ever was a battle ground, Linux / Android has won the Mobile space. M$ can take the hit when the desktop goes, the lack luster sales of new PC hardware vs mobile ( tablet etc etc ) is telling.
More than simple sales, the PC is where games (and in fact nearly ALL content) is actually created. Phones and tablets are fine for consuming content, but horrible for *creating* content. It's an open platform where people can generally do whatever they want with their hardware, and it's the most powerful computing device a consumer can generally purchase.
Smartphones and tablets are relatively new devices. As soon as the market is saturated and the technology matures, sales will drop off sharply, and you'll hear pundits moaning about the "demise" of those platforms as well. In fact, that's already happening with tablets, and I predict you'll start seeing the same thing with smartphones in another four or five years, maybe even sooner. Fewer and fewer people will be willing to purchase new phones every year or two in perpetuity.
Phones and tablets are much better consumer-level devices than PCs ever were. PCs are just moving into a new and arguably better niche as the most powerful line of computers for people who need or want to do more than a mobile device allows. The reason PC sales have dropped off considerably is that a) the worldwide market has been largely saturated, and b) computers have ridiculously powerful hardware for what most of them are required to do, so they don't need to be replaced nearly as often as they used to be.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Game devs don't really care. They'll use the API they have.
nVidia is (I believe) a Khronos founding member. They've always supported and contributed to DX and OpenGL.
DX survives because MS pushes it. They're the 800b gorilla with a monopoly over PC gamer operating systems and a strong share in the console market with the XBox One.