I think they want to seal off Playstation only to those who have the products (exclusives), and if they have the devs that make games for their platform then they can continue doing that.
I read that their own APIs are good and give slightly more performance than Vulkan. According to a developer it would be that Vulkan will make porting easier which is key thing to note.

I don't understand Sony though; if they support Vulkan, resulting in more Linux ports, it will weaken Microsoft. They would then have less revenue from Windows 10 and that will surely affect Xbox development. Maybe they are afraid that Microsoft will cave in if a scenario happens where Vulkan is adopted by everyone except them. Such scenario would put them at a disadvantage in regards to consoles, X1 would benefit from Vulkan porting too, but what are chances of Microsoft supporting Vulkan?

I hope in future Vulkan will hit D3D hard. It will make Linux gaming better but not just that, it will benefit consoles too. Say a game is developed for Linux (PC only intially), then later down road "I want to port to PS4 too"... graphics work is more or less done with Vulkan.

It is not hard to understand Sony. Sony does what benefits Sony the most (or at least Sony thinks it benefits).

That's why Sony's GNM and GNMX are very close to DirectX and not OpenGL: because the number of DerectX coders is greater than the number of OpenGL ones and Sony wants as may games on its console as possible.

Ha ha! No, seriously... Microsoft can not be weakened by "Linux ports". Because of many reasons: 1) they are ports and thus secondary at best by definition. They will have only fraction of initial customer base because they are always coming with (sometmes huge) time gap with initial release and 2) Linux is only a fraction of the PC market while that is only a fraction of the console market.

If one wants to undermine Microsoft, one should aim at what hurts the most: XBone console. And that's what Sony does (luring potential XBone developers into Playstation sphere of influence by providing familiar API).

You didn't get the point. Increase in amount of games on Linux increases amount of Linux users - it's a known trend. So it does weaken MS. So far it's the only major driver of desktop Linux adoption. Another would be manufacturers starting selling computers with Linux preinstalled to mass market. That so far isn't happening.

Sony can indeed weaken MS by adopting Vulkan - they'll undermine one of the strongest MS lock-in tools, i.e. DirectX. All new APIs are completely different form the older ones (i.e. DX12 has nothing to do with older DX), so there is no point for Sony to lure anyone with faimiliarity. They can however attract more developers by providing cross platform APIs such as Vulkan.

Yeah... The whole PC gaming market is estimated to be only 10% of console market. Even annihilating Windows would barely hurt Microsoft. Right now Microsoft does not even control Windows gaming -- Valve does. Microsoft tries to expel the usurper but was not successful so far. There is the source firsthand: Microsoft Structure. Most of the income Microsoft gets from business and corporative solutions from their "Business Division" ("Microsoft Office", "Microsoft Dynamics AX" aka "Axapta") Their "Entertainment and Devices Division" is worse for wear -- after Windows Phone (repeated!) fiasco they merged "XBox division" which was autonomous at the time of "360" console with "Devices Division" in order to hide losses from "Windows RT" devices behind impressive gains from the hugely successful console. The only presence on PC gaming market is this: Microsoft Studios.

Sony can not hurt Microsoft in the "Windows Gaming" simply because it already hardly can be any worse for Microsoft. That's why all those "Windows 10", "Microsoft Store" "Games for Windows" and other largely unsuccessful attempts were made.

Not quite. There are laptops with preinstalled Linux around.

And they are doing just that. No point of Vulkan adoption because it is cross-platform. Why would give your slaves (aka game developers) the tool they can use to escape your reign? Sony is strong now. It aims not at liberation of developers from the DirectX reign but at enslavement them with their own proprietary technology.

Sony == DRM! They are the prime examples. Remember "Memory Stick" in their products when everyone else uses "SD cards"? Sony does not want to use standards, it wants its own "de-facto standards".

Sony aims at DirectX 11, not 12. And again, Vulkan is the enemy for Sony. They attract developers better with money: "either you are releasing for our PlayStation 4 or you are out of customers because all of the gamers are ours." And they can do so! PS4 won, XBone lost, PC never had the chance; Nintendo is out of the scope.

According to newzoo.com, PC+MMO occupied 28% of total game market in 2015, and 27% in 2016.
Console games only occupied 30% in 2015, and 29% in 2016.

Mobile games have surpassed console games, that is why Nintendo release Super Mario Run.

The whole PC gaming market is over 90% of console market now.

An intriguing question, which has the same answer as another question; does Nvidia endorse Vulkan?

No, not really.

edit: Nvidia isn't an endorser of DX12 either, so perhaps it's up in the air. Probably Cyberpunk 2077 will just use DX11, that's what Nvidia endorses.

Nvidia is part of the Vulkan working group, so they endorse it.

Microsoft is part of Khronos, so we don't need to doubt their commitment to OpenGL.

Nvidia is part of the Vulkan group because they have to, not because they want to.

Why wouldn't they want to? They benefit from all the advancements that Vulkan gets. Probably only because of Nvidia, Nintendo Switch has Vulkan support.

Don't get me wrong, Nvidia has a lot of bad lock-in tendencies, but Vulkan is something that they got right.

According to Nvidia, they're putting something called NVN on the Switch as the graphics API

"NVIDIA additionally created new gaming APIs to fully harness this performance. The newest API, NVN, was built specifically to bring lightweight, fast gaming to the masses."

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/10/20/nintendo-switch/

I'm not aware that Nvidia was any more or less involved in the development of Vulkan than anyone else in the Khronos group.

It just says: "Vulkan is the result of 18 months in an intense collaboration between leading hardware, game engine and platform vendors, built on significant contributions from multiple Khronos members"

https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-releases-vulkan-1-0-specification

But to answer your question, why wouldn't they want to endorse Vulkan; same reason Nvidia doesn't endorse DX12, their hardware is optimized for DX11 and has no architectural advantages in DX12. In fact, quite the reverse, since no Nvidia hardware can fully utilze all Vulkan or DX12 features and benefits.

Which isn't crazy surprising, because both Vulkan and DX12 are built on Mantle, which was a great match for AMD's GCN architecture. Mantle was of course first developed by DICE, who went first to Nvidia and asked them to sponsor the API and were turned down. Then went to AMD and a match was made and AMD and DICE co-developed Mantle.

Nvidia bet everything on DX11 and it shows, the DX11 performance of their GPUs is phenomenal. But that comes at a price, being incredibly good at single thread performance won't make you king of multihread performance when that comes along, which it has with Vulkan and DX12.

That's a higher level API, but it doesn't prevent you from using Vulkan directly there. Khronos noted, that higher level APIs based on Vulkan are still missing. So clearly Nvidia is taking advantage of that there.

Yes, that is a higher level graphics API, but it is the API that will be used by default. Vulkan is supported on the Switch, so is OpenGL, but that's neither here nor there since developers will use NVN, which isn't a high level API like OpenGL - but a custom hackjob by Nvidia. It's good enough.

Games on the Nintendo Switch will be NVN based, not Vulkan based.

Why would they? It's a non portable API which they can't reuse. If they aren't stupid, they won't use it.

Let's try find out how many of these confirmed games for Switch is using what api:

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - ???
Splatoon Switch - ???
Mario Kart Switch - ???
Just Dance 2017 - ???
Sonic 2017 - ???
Dragon Quest X: The Five Awakening Races Online - ??? (long title!)
Dragon Quest XI - ???
Yooka-Laylee - ???
Stardew Valley - ???
Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom - ???
Lego City Undercover - ???
Rime - ???
Cube Life: Island Survival - ???
Untitled Steamworld Game - ???

It doesn't look promising. I have not heard of any of these games in conjuction with Vulkan.

Nintendo Switch supports Vulkan, OpenGL 4.5 and OpenGL ES.
I doubt any newly-ported old game will want to use NVN.