After seeing a popular indie game developer connect directly to MySQL from his game [1] - nothing surprises me anymore.
[1] http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&thr...
[1] http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&thr...
Contemporary HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3387628