This year Nintendo quietly joined the Khronos Group, that not-for-profit consortium of academics and media companies dedicated to managing open-standard graphics APIs like OpenGL and its successor, Vulkan.

This means Nintendo has joined up with companies like Microsoft, Sony, Oculus and Nvidia to exert some influence over the development and promotion of license-free, royalty-free products using Khronos tech. 

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.