So you don’t make the same error, here’s a primer on what you should expect from the in-app purchases you make on your Apple devices. First thing to know, there are four types: non-replenishable, replenishable, subscriptions and auto-renewing subscriptions.

Non-replenishable in-app purchases

The most common type of in-app purchase that I have encountered in non-game apps are the non-replenishable kind.This includes purchases that enable features within an application.  Some developers opt to distribute one app for free, then enable more features for a price. These only need to be purchased once and can be transfered to multiple devices, provided they all are authorized with the same iTunes account. This type of in-app purchase will survive a new iPhone purchase and will be there for you when you restore a device from a backup of your OS.

The one drawback is that this in-app purchase category does not transfer between app stores.  If you buy an app on both the iOS and Mac app stores — say, ByWord, like I did — and pay to unlock a new feature on one platform, that in-app purchase will not transfer over to the other platform. I have ByWord on my Mac and on iOS. I just recently noticed that the premium publishing upgrade I paid for in the iOS version on my iPhone, it does not transfer to the OS X version of the app on my Mac the way it did for my iPad.

Replenishable in-app purchases

Then there are the replenishable in-app purchases. These are most commonly found in games and can be purchased multiple times. One popular example is smurfberries, a replenishible in-app purchase that caused some controversy with parents when they first arrived in the App Store via the Smurfs Village game. With this type of item you pay for in a game, you may think that it is a non-replenishible in-app purchase and it would transfer between devices, but you never know for sure. (Smurfberries don’t.) Most of the time you find out when it is too late too: after you have already transfered over to a new device you just bought, or you have already reset the device and restored from a backup.

This happened to me recently when installing Dude Perfect on a second device.  I thought that the in-app purchase that enabled the level editor was the kind of in-app purchase you only have to buy once, so I was shocked to discover after purchasing it first on my iPhone, that I had to pay for it again when I tried to access the feature on my iPad. Not cool, dudes.

One-time subscriptions

There is a similar distinction when it comes to subscriptions purchased through Apple. There are basic subscriptions that expire after a period of time, like purchasing a single issue of a magazine, which is really just a one-month subscription. And then there are auto-renewing subscriptions that keep on going until you cancel them.  I now manage many of my magazine subscriptions via my iTunes account. Individual one-time subscriptions cannot be transfered or synced to another device, whereas auto-renewing subscriptions can. With subscriptions you tend to know ahead of time what you are getting into, though. Especially when it is an auto-renewing subscription.

Auto-renewing subscriptions

The one type of in-app purchase that really stands out from the rest is the auto-renewing subscription. If you are using an iOS device, open the App Store, go to the Featured tab, and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. Tap on the Apple ID button to view your account information. Here you will see a button that will allow you to manage all of the auto-renewing subscriptions that you have already purchased. This is also how you cancel your subscription. You can also access and manage your auto-renewing subscriptions from your Mac by using iTunes. Just choose the Store menu and click on the View My Account menu item.

Keeping track of in-app purchases

Like auto-renewing subscriptions, it would be convenient to see a listing of all of my non-replenishable in-app purchases. Apple already allows me to see my complete purchase history for music, videos, books and apps. Why not add non-replenishable in-app purchases to the list as well? Only then would one be able to truly know what they are getting themselves into when making an in-app purchase.

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It will start taking submissions of software titles Sept. 5 via its Steam Greenlight site.

The company, which claims 40 million users of its PC and Mac games,  is not to be taken lightly. As Forbes reported in March: “Privately held Valve has dominated the digital sales channel [for games] since 2003. Its Steam service started as a distribution mechanism for its own games; lack of competition allowed it to seize as much as 70 percent of the market.”

According to the Steam blog:

“The Software titles coming to Steam range from creativity to productivity. Many of the launch titles will take advantage of popular Steamworks features, such as easy installation, automatic updating, and the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space so your files may travel with you.”

When it comes to broadly used productivity software, Valve will face a ton of competition. Microsoft already fields an online store and is building access to new Office and SharePoint stores right into the next releases of those widely used business packages.

In the post Mark Richardson, a Valve business development exec, said the company’s user base is interested in more than games. “They have told us they would like to have more of their software on Steam, so this expansion is in response to those customer requests.”

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From casual playthings to massively multi-player online worlds, Chinese game half-year revenue rose 16.9 percent from last year to 23.5 billion yuan ($3.7 billion), according to International Data Corp (via Shanghai Daily), with 71.6 percent earned at home.

Now some of China’s leading game operators are looking to go west, as the country’s explosive broadband and mobile adoption growth looks like slowing.

Shanda Games, one of the main publishers, has acquired a majority of German massively-multiplayer online game (MMOG) operator eFusion, which will partner with Shanda’s Eyedentity studio to promote Shanda’s big Dragon Nest MMPORG in Europe (via GamesIndustry.biz).

Shanda is not alone:

• MICGadget: “Perfect World, a Beijing-based online game company specializing in MMORPGs, expects overseas revenue to account for 30 percent of its total revenue this year, compared with 10 percent in 2011. Perfect World has already set up subsidiaries in the US, Europe and Japan.”
• Chinese web giant Tencent last year bought a majority of U.S. game studio Riot Games for $231.5 million.
• Shanda bought up another U.S. studio, Mochi Media.

U.S. players should be under no illusion – the Chinese online and game markets are super-advanced. Some 20.4 million active users on average played Shanda’s games in Q4 2011, with an average 4.5 million of them paying an average RMB 92.8 ($14.50) per month. Shanda has been trying to break outside of China. Licensing its games to portals in Thailand, Indonesia, Russia and Germany brought an 89 percent lift in international sales year-on-year.

Is that a threat to the west’s dominant Zynga and Playfish? Not necessarily. Zynga wants to help Chinese game developers in to America.

Zynga China GM Andy Tian has targeted “leveraging on Zynga’s platform, helping Chinese game developers expand into overseas market” (via TechNode) – more Chinese games are due to launch in the west in the next few months.

Partnership seems like the right approach. Many western companies entering China tend to fail thanks to cultural differences, lack of local business understanding and being shut out by protective authorities.

But Zynga will need to tread carefully, doing partnerships that work both at home and in the Far East, which continues to represent a market ripe for western involvement. Zynga’s top priority is strengthening partnerships with Tencent and Sina Weibo, according to Tian.

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Appsfire is a social recommendation service for apps that introduced its App Scores system in May. The system uses an app’s star ratings from users, social media buzz as well as the developer’s overall reputation. The scoring system, which has been in the works for more than two years, is what informs the monthly reports that will begin with Friday’s first publication. After Apple jumpstarted the mobile app industry in 2008, finding good apps has become increasingly more difficult as the number of apps available has skyrocketed.

The motivation of publishing this data is to help people get a sense of what apps others are using at specific periods of time, which is normally difficult, Ouriel Ohayon, co-founder of Appsfire, said in a phone conversation Friday.

“The only moment of the year you really know what’s happening with [App Store] rankings is when Apple posts the most downloaded apps of the year. And they are only based on download activity. If the app is highly downloaded, it sometimes means the app is good,” he said.

But sometimes it doesn’t. A current example: Pyramid Run is right now No. 1 on the App Store for free iPhone apps. But the user feedback is terrible: out of 3,387 user ratings there are 2,406 one-star ratings. The same phenomenon can be seen in the long-term most-downloaded apps in the App Store. Facebook’s mobile app, for example, dominates the all-time most-downloaded charts because it’s an indispensable utility for many folks. But, as many of us know, the user experience is objectively awful, and the reviews in the App Store reflect this.

Appsfire’s rankings determined that the best free iPhone app ever is Instagram, and the best paid iPhone app of all time is WhatsApp Messenger. As of March, when Apple released its own top iPhone apps, its data shows the No. 1 free app was Facebook, while the No. 1 paid was Angry Birds (Apple doesn’t differentiate between games and non-games in its rankings the way Appsfire does).

Source: Appsfire

See Appsfire’s slide deck for the full list.

The point of these alternative rankings is to show that there are other ways to find good quality apps beyond going by what has been heavily downloaded — which can, and has been, easily gamed. App discovery is a serious problem for all mobile app stores, but Apple has the toughest challenge because of sheer volume: there more than 650,000 apps available for iOS. And even with Apple’s lists, “starter kits,” genre highlights and editor’s picks, digging through those can be exhausting. That’s where Appsfire and other companies like it hope to be of service. For more on the app discovery conundrum, see my GigaOM Pro report (subscription required).

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On Thursday it made its debut on iOS and Android, with PC, Mac and Windows Phone versions apparently on the way.

To be honest, there’s not much to say about Amazing Alex itself. It’s a physics puzzler in which you use a variety of objects to construct Domino Rally-style pathways that complete a task — such as moving a ball from one side of the screen to the other, or bursting a balloon. Cue comparisons with a million other titles out there, including big ones like Cut The Rope, and of course, Angry Birds.

In fact, it might look even more familiar than that: As rumors suggested, it does seem to be a pretty much a re-badging of a game called Casey’s Contraptions, which proved popular with players and was bought by Rovio recently. The art, design and most other things seem the same.

In fact, the core mechanic is pretty similar to Angry Birds, and the rest of the game owes it a great debt too. My first impressions were that it was a fairly strong example of its type, but didn’t quite have the destructive, chaotic element that makes Angry Birds so addictive. Plus on the iOS versions it was hit with a glitch that meant it couldn’t connect to Game Center, a problem which caused a bit of consternation.

@amazingalex I bought it half an hour ago. It won’t let me on game center.

— Cole Miller (@colewmiller) July 12, 2012

But generally reaction seems pretty good so far. It’s already selling well in the app stores: currently No3 in the iTunes paid apps as I speak.

So the big question: does it have staying power? That’s not clear. Very few games do.

But of course, Amazing Alex doesn’t need to be a megahit: Rovio is already making a ton of money. But it still has something to prove.

The company does need to show that it can generate success away from the Angry Birds franchise if it’s going to live up to its billing and become something of real significance. In this case, it seems to be trying to do that not by building a new game (remember, it infamously produced 51 non-hit games before Angry Birds) but in trying to use its marketing power to push existing IP into the stratosphere.

I’ve argued before that Rovio really needs to show it’s got more in the tank if it wants to meet its ambitions and go public — as it has said it wants to on many occasions.

Sure, it’s milking the Angry Birds brand for everything it can get, including games, toys, theme parks, the rest. But if it wants to build a Disney-style business, and not just burn on the bonfire of single-franchise entertainment properties, then it needs Amazing Alex to be right up there.

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The group, which claims to be the first of its kind in Europe, had been due to close its doors to applicants on Tuesday. But in an email, co-founder Paul Bragiel told me that the decision to extend the deadline was not because they had not had enough high quality submissions.

“[We] had a big uptake in applications starting yesterday, so just want to make sure we can accommodate,” said Bragiel, who is also a partner at early stage program I/O Ventures in San Francisco.

“I have been quite happy with the applications. Honestly I was wary they would be weak compared to the ones I see with I/O Ventures [where he is also a partner] … but I have been pleasantly surprised.”

The projects submitted so far, he says, include a great deal of mobile and location-based gaming projects, as well as gamification services. There was also some social gaming “but that is considerably less than I saw a year or two ago.”

The program, which is based in Estonia, aims to bring together teams to develop their existing game-related products — which should already be in beta at least — over three months. A range of mentors will arrive from around the Central, Eastern and Baltic regions come together to work with a maximum of 10 companies, with a program that starts in September.

While it is a little unusual to extend deadlines for positive reasons, Bragiel’s co-founder Sven Illing told me that it was not uncommon — and pointed to the example of Startupbootcamp Berlin, which recently extended its deadline after a surge in attention.

“It seems a good idea to use the momentum,” he said. “You can never have too many good applications.”

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While MindCandy has bought IP before, this marks the first company-sized acquisition for hotly-tipped startup, and an interesting one too. Origami Blue was formed by refugees from Disney’s Black Rock studio, which was closed down in 2011. But although Black Rock specialized in racing games like MotoGP, it seems that Mind Candy is buying it for work they’ve since been doing on augmented reality applications and animation. The company said in a statement that the OB team would become the engine behind a new experimental development arm it’s calling “Candy Labs”.

But it looks like the company’s ambitions don’t end with a single purchase.

A recent job listing for a manager to work on M&A suggests that the company is looking for more than just the odd tumble — and may be at the start of a serious acquisition spree.

The ad, which ran a couple of months ago, suggests that more buyouts could be on the way.

Applicants would be required to “set strategy and source potential M&A and investment targets,” it says, monitor the market for potential movement and “determine bidding strategy and negotiate deals.”

It’s a big step from the company not least because it hints at an apparently strong financial position — achieved despite relatively modest venture funding from big names like Index and Accel.

While its last audited accounts show £1.2 million of profit on revenues of £7.5 million (that’s $1.8 million on $11.6 million), they go back to the end of 2010. Since then, the company has increased its user base to around 75 million people globally, and last year Spark Ventures cashed out in a move that valued the company at $200 million. In the meantime, Mind Candy boss Michael Acton Smith says “”our valuation is now substantially higher than that” and the business has been talked up as a potential IPO candidate.

Side note: interestingly one of Moshi’s biggest competitors, Club Penguin, (which is also owned by Disney) has its UK headquarters just a stone’s throw from Origami Blue’s offices.

Update: Clarified MindCandy’s 2009 purchase of the website Tutpup, which Acton Smith says “was a simple IP acquisition. No staff came across with the deal.”

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Playfish co-founders Shukri Shammas and Sami Lababidi founded London-based Mindshapes together with David Begg, Chrisian Dorffer and Tareq Naqib in 2010 to make interactive education games for kids on multiple platforms.

Now it is taking money led by Index Ventures together with Richmond Park Partners and previous backers.

The company last took a $5 million first investment round in November 2011. It did not say why it is taking the second investment, six months later.

So far, Mindshapes has developed Magic Town, a virtual world that launched on web on May 16 and includes 70 stories from 15 children’s book publishers including Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Penguin. The service plans to launch on iOS this summer and include 200 stories by year’s end.

The outfit also wants to target elder users, with an upcoming learning game, Language City London, aimed at the 16-to-30 market.

“Users will also be able to buy access to premium chapters based on licensed entertainment brands,” according to the company.

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Currently, iSwifter’s iPad app allows people to play thousands of Facebook games using its streaming cloud-infrastructure, which doesn’t require any extra work by developers. But with TheWorx, Facebook users now have a way to get more of their whole experience in one iPad app. Facebook’s website relies on Flash for gaming but that doesn’t translate well to Android devices and is not available on iOS devices.

TheWorx app pulls in Facebook information using the Open Graph API. Users will have to pay to get access to the App Hub tab using Apple’s in-app purchasing system, with the one-time fee still yet to be determined. But they will also be able to use their Facebook Credits inside the games to buy virtual goods. ISwifter’s platform streams the games from its servers so it gets around the iPad’s ban on Flash.

This would seem to be more competition for Facebook, evidence of how another company can create a better iPad experience than Facebook can. But there  may be reasons why Facebook isn’t that worried. TheWorx will allow existing PC ads to run on the right side, so Facebook can still make money from those ads. In its S-1, Facebook said 4 percent of its revenue came from ads next to Zynga games. Also, the ability to still make money from iPad gaming on TheWorx app could also be appealing. Zynga’s games contributed 15 percent of Facebook’s revenues in the first quarter. Most of that comes from Facebook’s 30 percent cut of purchases in Zynga games on the platform or from advertising revenue paid directly from Zynga.

Still, it’s another reminder that Facebook still has to figure out how to get its mobile act together. Its apps are slow and often perform worse compared to their mobile web counterparts. We had a good explanation about why that’s the case.

Facebook is looking to expand advertising through mobile but that can be a tricky play with the smaller screens found on smartphone and tablet devices. But if it can get more revenue out of its app usage and Facebook credits on mobile devices, it could help make up for its poor showing in mobile. I still wonder if Facebook will tolerate TheWorx, which could siphon people away from its existing apps and sites.

Facebook could fix this issue by figuring out a way to support its Flash-based games on its mobile apps. It’s working on getting content specifically made for its iPad app but it hasn’t happened on a large scale. Or it could think about buying iSwifter, which has done a lot of the work already.

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But while Zynga CEO Mark Pincus was all smiles on signing the deal, he may be less impressed six weeks on, thanks to an intriguing report from Forbes that indicates a precipitous decline in the game’s user base since the acquisition.

According to figures from AppData.com, the simple and highly-addictive drawing game — which rocketed to 36 million downloads in just a few weeks — has lost around a third of its daily active users in the past month.

So what’s going wrong? There seem to be three major possibilities on the cards.

Technical problems

Lots of players have reported trouble accessing the game over the past few weeks. That seems to be a scaling problem, with the servers struggling to meet the demand of more and more downloads — though the move to shift OMGPOP’s traffic onto Zynga’s “Z-cloud” may also be a culprit, since similar reports are also surfacing about another game, Words With Friends.

For many new and existing players, server issues that mean dropped games or lost moves are an immediate black mark against the game: something that can really hurt in the instant gratification world of mobile entertainment.

Zyngafication

Moving to the Z-cloud meant something else, too: the addition of new features that seem to have soured many players’ relationships with the game. For the most part, this means pushy Facebook and Twitter integration — though the company does seem to have also expanded the number of advertisements, too, taking more money from Doritos, the NHL and others to include brand-related words into the game’s dictionary.

These might not be a turn-off for everyone, but they do seem to have had an impact on some users who feel uncomfortable at the commercial options.

Natural wastage

While Draw Something was an overnight success — spreading virally, zooming up the charts and bringing in a lot of revenue for its makers — many people are saying that they bored of it rapidly. That’s not entirely untypical for a faddish game, and since it has little variation, a pretty limited dictionary and real no long-term stickyness it appears OMGPOP hasn’t done a great deal to boost the game’s longevity.

This sort of wastage is pretty normal for short attention span games, which makes their success all about growth: you have to keep marketing the game to new players and expanding the overall market to compensate for those who switch off.

So who’s fault is this? And is it a real problem, or just a temporary glitch?

Some may argue that this isn’t a big deal for Zynga, since it owns not just Draw Something, but the entire business and team behind it. However, as we wrote at the time, Zynga’s purchase was not really about talent acquisition — while OMGPOP’s team are no doubt smart, they’d produced so many duds that the company didn’t have many rolls of the dice left.

No, for Zynga it was a numbers game: the revenues and user base of Draw Something were interesting, but underneath it all it was really about gaining access to a large, mainstream, purchase-happy audience.

Those users are great targets for Zynga to sell its other games to. And the speed at which Draw Something was growing — it had more than 36 million downloads in just a few weeks — meant that the audience was going to be significant.

Except it’s not. And that’s got to hurt.

If this drop continues — in fact, even if the decline is arrested — it could become a really serious problem for Zynga. After all, it not only shows a lack of judgment from management in buying into a fad when it’s at its very peak, but it also suggests that the company wants to strip mine new assets rather than build them up.

Because while scaling issues and a lack of longevity may be rooted in problems at OMGPOP’s end, the reality is that all these issues have been made worse, not better, by Zynga’s involvement. It’s either failed to support the game fast enough and bring in enough new users, or it’s been actively making it worse for players.

And none of those are good news.

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