The PocketGamer.biz week that was: User acquisition is a cancerous waste of money, Unite 2012 is a learning experience and the Amazon Appstore hits Europe

Since I'm based in the UK, this week was the very first time I've had the opportunity to muck around with the Amazon Appstore.

And actually, I was quite impressed.

There's nothing revolutionary about it, but Amazon's shrewd use of freebies, for instance, is an excellent way of luring users into the Appstore each day, bringing customers back time-after-time with the promise of a freee app every 24 hours.

What's more, the presence of personalised recommendations and the clearly marked ability to filter searches by average user ratings mean that the browsing shopper is less dependent on download rankings for app discovery.

On paper, these are small additions. The App Store already lets you order searches by user rating (albeit only on iPad) and Google Play makes recommendations based on your existing purchases. But taken together, they take shift the onus – even if only a little – away from rankings, and therefore, away from user acquisition.

After all, putting the most downloaded apps front-and-centre on your app store is great for companies with oodles to spend on user acquisition (or access to a bot farm), but not so great for smaller devs – or, I would argue, the players.

Anyway, that's quite enough of this high-faultin' chatter for one week. Instead, let's move on to our bite-sized overview of the last seven days' worth of news.

• GREE international CEO Naoki Aoyagi tells us the company is aiming for 10 percent of its sales to come from outside Japan.
• Nokia and Microsoft could be the big winners from Apple's US patent victory, as Android OEMs seek an OS with fewer patent problems.
• Epic partners with Nvidia to bring the full PC implementation of Unreal Engine 3 to Windows RT.
• Amazon launches its Appstore for Android in the EU5 nations and labels the Kindle Fire as 'sold out', prompting speculation that a Kindle Fire 2 launch in the US and Europe is imminent.
• PlayMG asks the Kickstarter community for $950,000 to fund the MG, its Android-powered handheld gaming system that PlayMG hopes will make it the 'Nintendo or PlayStation of the app gaming space.'
• Atari partners with Microsoft to bring arcade classics to HTML5 browsers.

• The shift from 99c to freemium gaming is what's prompted Activision's return to mobile, explains Activision Mobile VP Greg Canessa.
• The industry will be paying close attention to Molyneux's monetisation experiments, says Neon Play CEO Oli Christie.

• Crowdstar announces four new partnerships with publishers – Kabam has set aside a pot of cash for developers promoting its games, while GREE, Crowdstar and Booyah are offering cash to developers on a per install basis through Chartboost direct deal kiosks.
• W3i reports that revenues at the firm have risen 330 percent during its most recent quarter, and the service was able to deliver 80,000 app installations for one dev in one day.
• Andrew Smith explains to PocketGamer.biz how Twitter and Facebook alone is powering Fluid Football to more than 40,000 downloads a day.

• Following his trip to Amsterdam, PocketGamer.biz editor Keith Andrew lays out the five big lessons from Unite 2012.
• Following last week's barrage of closures, job losses and restructuring, the PocketGamer.biz Mobile Gaming Mavens debate exactly what this means for the mobile games industry.
• In a two-part series, GamesAnalytics COO Mark Robinson lays out a set of tips and best-practices for effective in-game messaging and monetisation.
• User acquisition is a waste of money that will eventually kill the mobile games industry, argues PocketGamer.biz editor-at-large Jon Jordan.
• After the founders of Freeverse leave, ngmoco downsizes the iOS studio, prompting Jon Jordan to get all opinionated again. This time, Jordan argues that the whole episode was evidence that only indies can expect real independence.