The Khronos group are in charge of writing the specifications for open APIs which target things such as the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) for 3D graphics or the Open Sound Library (OpenSL) for audio or OpenKODE for platform-agnostic access.
The current open source stack which follows the 'graphical' and 'compute' standards created by the Khronos group are inside the Mesa 3D graphics library, for instance, OpenGL, Open Vector Graphics (OpenVG) and the Open Compute Library (OpenCL) and are named 'state trackers.' The Embedded-System Graphics Library (EGL) functions as the interface between these APIs and the windowing system which is exactly what the Wayland Display Server is basing itself on.
It would be in Canonical's best interest to consider putting resources and developer time in such a project because currently it is still in the developing phase and not feature-complete especially in the driver stack which provides Mesa and its 'state trackers' hardware accelerated access. For example, the currently highest supported version of OpenGL support is 2.1 with only partial support for 3.x features (the latest OpenGL standard is 4.x).
The alternative for game developers right now is to rely on proprietary drivers coming from Nvidia and AMD to support their hardware to have stable access to OpenGL and OpenCL. Ubuntu has always been about freedom and open source solutions, however as it stands now the open source video drivers are not stable enough and lack features and performance to compete at this stage now.
Mesa will continue to move forward to solve this problem but it seems to not be at a fast enough pace and for Ubuntu to move forward I believe that this needs to be a huge priority not just for games and other interactive media but for the platform moving forward as a whole.
There are also other API standards like OpenKODE which is a platform-agnostic way of interfacing with the operating system for events, file I/O, etc. and plugs in very well with EGL and its family of graphical and audio APIs. This shouldn't be too hard to have official support as it layers over the top of POSIX quite well.
OpenSL seems to be the successor to the Open Audio Library (OpenAL) and Ubuntu would highly benefit from having first-grade support for this library as well, and it supports many profiles (Game, Phone, Music) which covers way more than OpenAL and can interface with other components like OpenMAX to supply hardware-acceleration. As far as I'm aware there are no serious open source projects which cover these APIs currently and I think that this should be changed as well.
These APIs fit very well for Ubuntu's eventual move to the Wayland Display Server as it is based entirely on Mesa and EGL, as well as Ubuntu's venture into mobile platforms, and will make a lot of game developers happy (and most likely other non-game developers too). If the effort is placed right now, I can see 5 years from now that the Ubuntu platform would be a highly compelling platform to develop first-grade interactive applications like games which run perfectly on the hardware.
