CES is happening, so expect a lot of hardware news to slip into your blips in the next few days.

News Blips:

Reports of the demise of Ubisoft’s digital rights management were greatly exaggerated. Ubisoft will continue to use their DRM -- which requires a constant Internet connection -- to play their newest and most popular games. Yesterday we explained that the DRM requirement had been dropped for Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction on the PC, which is true, but Ubisoft has stressed that it's done on a case-by-case basis. Both of those games have aged, putting on a few pounds and sprouting crow’s feet,and now Ubisoft doesn’t quite love them enough to continue protecting them as much as some of their younger, perkier games. [ShackNews]

Jon Shafer, former lead designer on Civilization 5, has joined Stardock to work on Elemental: War of Magic and his own new game. Shafer said that he left Civ developer Firaxis on good terms, joining Stardock in order to have creative freedom. That means the lead designers on the last two Civ games have left after completing only one Civ game, making them the video-game equivalent of the Defense Against the Dark Arts professors in Harry Potter. Shafer will help Stardock expand on its latest release, Elemental: War of Magic, but then will then will lead his own development team -- that is, if Snape doesn’t get him first. [BigDownload]

OnLive compatibility will be built into Vizio televisions. Up until the recent release of the OnLive microconsole, the only way to get OnLive’s streaming video games on to your TV was if your computer had an HDMI-out port. Vizio is aiding OnLive in furthering the obsolescence of those old-fashioned consoles cluttering your entertainment center by including an app in their Via Plus HDTVs that will make OnLive’s games playable directly from the TV. This is a major coup for the game-streaming company as they try to establish themselves as a legitimate alternative to a traditional console.

GameFly rings in 2011 by listing the most popular games of 2010. If you subscribe to GameFly’s game-rental-by-mail service, then you're probably vaguely aware of which games will top this list due to how long they took to ship to your house. Here are the top 5 most popular cross-platform games:

1.) Red Dead Redemption
2.) Call of Duty: Black Ops
3.) Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
4.) Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2
5.) Battlefield: Bad Company 2

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