While it’s easy enough to figure out what the most popular games are simply by going over to AppData and looking at the numbers, I thought the end of the year might be a chance to reflect on what were some of the most significant games of 2009, and discuss their impact, for better and for worse.

Some of these games were hits, and others were bombs, but they are all games that will have (or should have) an impact on the way we’ll make our games in 2010.

I’m concentrating on articles about social game development, including the opportunities and challenges of making games for social platforms. If that interests you definitely take a look.

Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about new entries for Mediashifters. I may talk about more general gaming trends, since no one seems to be following mainstream gaming in general, and I’m hearing too many people saying Sony “won” E3. Hint:They did not.

If you have any ideas about what you’d like me to be writing about here that I’m not covering over on ISG, please let me know.

“Through the VolleeX engine, we can take full PC games, MMOs or even virtual worlds and stream them to any 3G enabled handsets, “says Vollee’s head of business development, Julian Corbertt in an interview with Pocket Gamer. “This means that you can now access games or full persistent online worlds right from your mobile handset. It’s a real step forward for mobile games as you can now have meaningful connected experiences on your handset.”

But maybe they’re just aiming too high. Streaming games will never really deliver core game experiences to the degree that twitch players are going to find acceptable, at least not until we fix the speed of light. Still the idea of doing it with something like WOW makes infinite sense, and allows you to deliver relatively high end graphical experiences to relatively low-end platforms.

Applications on Facebook are already becoming more server driven, so why not pull the whole thing over and deliver rich, immersive experiences one click at a a time to audience that will be perfectly happy with lag and a low frame rate?

The animation industry was taken by surprise when Hanna Barbera starting delivering cartoons for television using less than a quarter of the frame-rate of features. Could history be about to repeat itself?

Every time a new market opens up the first games to appear are built on traditional, time-tested play patterns. From the DS to the iPhone, from XBLA to browser games, it’s always rock-solid gameplay that shows up first, with the fancy stuff pulling up in a later bus. And it’s been true since the beginning of the medium. It wasn’t the gorgeous graphics that made pong a household name.

Sure, basic expectations have grown in the last thirty years. These days players expect a lot more from even the most basic games than just a sprinkling of pixels and some bloops and bleeps. But it’s not zero-sum either. In the wrong hands, or used in the wrong way, adding more graphical effects may just serve to confuse your audience, or make a game that has less mainstream appeal. More isn’t always better, and the audience for social games isn’t one that will necessarily appreciate a hardcore experience.

My latest piece is on the bright future for Social Games.  I’m currently working on something a little less optimistic.

Here’s the excerpt to whet your appetite:

I’m actually beginning to wonder if the future for social platform gaming may turn out to be so rosy that our dogs and cats will indeed be a target market for social entertainment in the next few years.

There have been a few concrete events in the last couple of weeks that have given me a reason to have some genuine optimism. First is Facebook Connect, which strikes me as proof positive that Facebook is, for the present at least, genuinely committed to supporting application developers in a (mostly) open manner that will everyone to continue to make a decent profit for the (foreseeable) future. (There’s that conservative side speaking again.) Allowing everyone to win may seem like an obvious strategy, but the history of games is one where the person providing you with the platform is also one of your biggest competitors. Sony, Nintendo, Sega, and even Microsoft, all had divisions making “first party” games that were trying to eat as much of the market as possible even while they were charging everyone else for the privilege of publishing on their platform. Even the Wii, last year’s great mainstream hope of the living room, is utterly dominated by titles made by Nintendo.