Hear that? Might be the death-rattle of DRM.

All in a day's worth of news, we see a pattern developing:

DEFCON 3 - despite rampant piracy (and the resulting scourge of "consolization"), the PC platform is still king. Hail to the king, baby:

A new report from the PC Gaming Alliance into the state of the platform in 2008 has revealed that the "largest single platform for games" took around USD 11 billion over the course of the 12 months.

It also noted the growth of digital distribution on the platform, driven by the continuing success of services such as Steam, the growth of free-to-play titles utilising micro-transactions, and the sale of game cards at retail chains.

MMOs were cited as one of the major sources of income for the PC games industry, noting World of Warcraft's USD 1 billion-plus contribution as well as several Asian MMOs taking USD 100 million apiece. (from gamesindustry.biz)

DEFCON 2 - Valve declares DRM obsolete. (As an anti-piracy measure, it always was. Legit users are the ones that actually feel the pain.) Says Steam News:

Headlining the new feature set is the Custom Executable Generation (CEG) technology that compliments the already existing anti-piracy solution offered in Steamworks. A customer friendly approach to anti-piracy, CEG makes unique copies of games for each user allowing them to access the application on multiple machines without install limits and without having to install root kits on their PC.

DEFCON 1 - one (non) word: OnLive. Gamasutra has the details from GDC:

OnLive, a tech company that has been in self-described "stealth mode" development for seven years, has unveiled new technology that allows even the most complex PC games to be played on a television set or any PC.

The ambitious venture, which hopes to revolutionize the gaming world by removing the need to continually upgrade PC hardware or buy new gaming consoles every generation, makes use of cloud computing -- doing all of the game's video and audio processing on remote servers, then streaming the resultant images and sound back to the user quickly enough to play games in real time.

What's most important though, says OnLive founder and CEO Steve Perlman and COO Mike McGarvey, is that the system works with any standard PC game, and does not require developers to code for a proprietary system.

As is the case with most innovations, industry adoption of these types of game-changers is likely to be painfully slow. Still, we may yet live to see the day when SecuRom and its ilk are dead as Dillinger.