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.

Amazon reviews never reflect the product, they reflect the passion people have for the product. As Jeff Bezos has pointed out again and again, most great products get 5 star and 1 star reviews. That makes sense… why would you be passionate enough about something that’s sort of ‘meh’ to bother writing a three star review?

A product that inspires intense responses will almost always have more success then those that only inspire a middling reaction.

As usual when these huge valuations come around, people tend to question whether or not the company is really worth it, especially when you consider they pulled off this kind of value in only 18 months.

But, as Venture Beat notes, this is all about the size of the audience. And let’s be honest here, games have never been this popular before. Even casual’s attempts to be mainstream meant titles only sold a couple of million at most.

Zynga has changed the game because they have done the single most important thing that you need to do in order to succeed online: They found the audience. Then they followed that up with a business model that works. It’s shown us an effective way to business in a world where the old media is still fighting their own biggest fans through draconian laws and DRM.

These are television numbers, and while there are many things that can (and probably will) go wrong as this business is further defined and consolidated, there is no doubt that things are different now then the were a year ago, and we won’t be going back.

That’s led to Facebook taking action– in this case, temporarily shutting down the Fishville application, which would seem to be a just punishment if the allegations turn out to be true.

Obviously, this isn’t over yet.

UPDATE: Zynga now says they’re pulling all offers from their games.

“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.

The first on is up now. You can check it out here

Here’s a taste:

While there’s lots to love about the iTunes experience as a customer, if you’re a publisher you only have very limited ways to connect with your audience. There’s the main page, some top ten lists, and even a bit of advertising scattered throughout the app store experience. Heck, there’s even a “What We’re Playing” list, although how you go about getting on it is something of a mystery, and it makes you wonder who “we” is actually supposed to be. But that’s it. There’s no social community to reach out to, no viral thought leaders, and no magazine or blog where you can really reach the players who “matter”.

Raph Koster is a designer who’s blog posts are always worth reading. His thoughts on the future of single-player were a big inspiration on my decision to focus on Social Games.

He’s just dropped a big post on ways to make virtual spaces more social, and there’s plenty of good stuff in there to mull over, not the least of which is that the ability to have an in-game way to reflect on your experiences (virtual and otherwise) is a key part of the socialization process. He points out that you need to actively incentivize players in order to get them to engage in activities that create social opportunities. There’s a subtle difference between that and just giving them straight rewards for being social, and I think it’s an important one.

In a much more limited environment like a Facebook game, that means giving the user the opportunity and the ability to share elements of their current Status with other players. The main problem right now is that the only way you can share that information is by putting it up on your wall and sharing it with everybody. That dilutes the impact, since most of your friends probably don’t care what you’re doing in Mob Wars, and your Mob Wars friends are much less likely to notice what happened to you and be able to comment on it in any significant way. Why not have Mob Wars update me about how my other friends in the game are doing and also give me the ability to comment?

Communication about status is a key social activity. In the end it’s the primary thing you do on Facebook, so it’s ironic that it isn’t being well exploited by the current generation of Social Platform Games that appear on it. Part of that is, of course, that those elements of social sharing can often be the ones that are the most easily exploited, so they tend to get locked out by the Terms of Service.