Comment by cyberax
> Microsoft controls Windows and DirectX, Valve only gets to play until Windows landlord allows it.
DirectX has to stay reasonably close to Vulkan. And Vulkan is not an afterthought for graphics card manufacturers, quite unlike OpenGL of yore.
And Win32 (sans Vulkan/DX) is mostly feature-complete for gaming purposes. Manufacturers can just target the current state of Win32 for a decade more, if not even longer.
It certainly is, in what concerns NVidia, they keep innovating first with Microsoft on DirectX, and then eventually come up with Vulkan extensions.
Last example, AI shaders announced at CEBIT.
Vulkan has turned into the same extension spaghetti as OpenGL.