Casual Connect in one corner of Germany, BlackBerry DevCon was more southerly in Amsterdam while Inside Social Apps was on the US west coast - conference season has definitely kicked off for the mobile gaming industry, and that means it's kicked off for PG.biz: the home of news and views on the business of app stores, smartphone platforms, developments in mobile game making and assorted technology.

Yet, aside from the physical interactions, the real action this week was happening in various shades of grey on the Apple App Store.

Last week was all about Clonegate, with Temple Jump getting pulled down because of its closeness to Temple Run. Apple's second shot over the bows of dishonest developers was to remove Tiny Tower reskin Pixel Story, also reminding developers about its rules.

However, that was only the first wave of attacks, with news of farming bot promotional outfits breaking. They claim to be able to get your game into the US top 25 free chart for as little as $5,000.

Zombie downloads

Once the news broke, so did all manner of insider information, from developers who said such services were generating up to $50,000 daily. Then TopDealApps - which had been fingered as offering such services; something it denies - told Pocket Gamer it has access to 200,000 US iTunes accounts.

Something that appeared to be even more concerning.

Chinese publisher - and NASDAQ floated company - Qihoo was caught up in the issue, with Apple pulling all its apps because of unusual review activity, only to quickly allow them back unchanged.

The bad news for Apple then continued, with the claim that apps could steal your iPhone contacts without permission. Then - the final play, the final straw - 3 Chinese language free-to-play games appeared in the US top grossing chart.

Digging into the story, we spoke to one of the companies caught up in the situation, which told us it had informed Apple of the issue in October 2011, and wished the OEM would give it access to its iTunes logs so it could ban users using online brokers - typically based in China - who buy in-game currency using stolen credit cards and hacked iTunes accounts.

Keep on running

Still, there's also plenty of evidence developers are finding the App Store the place to make their fortunes.

NimbleBit's Tiny Tower has now done 10 million iOS downloads, Halfbrick's Jetpack Joyride has done 13 million downloads, while Imangi's social phenomenon Temple Run has trumped them all with 36 million iOS downloads.

And going cross-platform, it's good news as well.

Spacetime's Legends MMO franchises (Pocket Legends and Star Legends) has clocked up 100 million sessions, while German online publisher Wooga is looking to mobile and HTML5 to continue the growth that saw its monthly users up 185 percent to 40 million during 2011.

Share of the profits

But let's get down to the scores on the financial doors.

Taking the tail end of the October-December financial year, there were some impressive performances.

Glu Mobile's 2011 revenues were up 3 percent to $66.2 million, but it posted a $21.2 million loss, while Korean publisher Com2uS saw its FY11 sales up 17 percent to $31 million.

At Capcom, mobile operations accounted for 23 percent of operating income as nine month FY12 sales rose 68 percent to $52 million.

Continuing the Japanese focus, Konami - which is the largest mobile business in the world - posted mobile and online revenues of $343 million for its first nine months of FY12. This is up 173 percent, thanks to its domination on DeNA's Mobage platform and GREE's rival GREE platform.

Neatly, DeNA also posted its financials this week. Its Q3 sales climbed 16 percent to $445 million, although it trimmed its US headcount with subsidiary ngmoco letting some staff go.

But they might get a job at GREE International, which is moving into a new San Francisco office and hiring, hiring, hiring. We spoke to its CEO Naoki Aoyagi about how Android's growth will fuel GREE's one billion mobile gamer goal.

And Finnish start up Ovelin raised an very nice $1.4 million in seed funding to expand its music education app WildChords.

Sky(the limit with)RIM?

You know RIM is big into games these days, don't you?

I do, because I've been to the past two BlackBerry DevCons and spoken to Anders Jeppsson, the company's head of games.

We spoke again this week, about how the new gaming group is working internally and externally to get BlackBerry up to speed with respect to gaming.

Other RIM people we came across included Volker Hirsch (via its Scoreloop acquisition), who revealed that the cross-platform social gaming network now has 25 million monthly active users. Also, in the gaming group, Sean Paul Taylor spoke about providing robust game development tools for the BlackBerry ecosystem.

Rising up the executive ladder, VP Chris Smith drummed out the gaming potential of PlayBook 2.0 and BB10, while the effervescent Alec Saunders pointed out that 40 percent of the top grossing apps on BlackBerry App World are PlayBook games.

The new top bod at the company, however, is CEO Thorsten Heins, who performed well in his first public event, talking up RIM's commitment to developers and BlackBerry's vibrant platform.

And, as if to round off the conference, German mobile ad network madvertise said that - on its network at least - BlackBerry was hot in Europe during 2011, with its share of ad impressions jumping 20 percent.

Cash With Friends

What else was going on in the world of apps and mobile gaming?

Developer Outfit7, which is behind the Talking Friends apps, revealed its total downloads had topped the 300 million mark, and celebrated by signing a deal for virtual merchandise with Iconicfuture.

Gameloft rolls out its social platform Gameloft Live to Android Market and iOS, while game cross-promotion network Chartboost said it had served up 1 billion ad impressions since its Q2 2011 launch.

And, in a week where Double Fine's Tim Schafer demonstrated you can raise cash for game development, we spoke to appbackr's Trevor Cornwell, who has his own very ambitious plans for the app wholesaling operation - 'AdSense meets eBay' was cited, and not by us.

Bad, Google

But let's end with hardcore hardware news.

Given that Motorola's about to bought by Google, VP Christy Wyatt - surprisingly - went on the record to say that the deployment of Ice Cream Sandwich (and other Android updates) was Google's fault, not device manufacturers.

Better news came from developer Bionic Panda, which said its monetisation rates on Android jumped 25 percent when it stripped out PayPal and dedicated itself to Google Checkout.

Similarly, Creative Mobile claimed its Android IAP revenue doubled when it integrated monetisation platform SponsorPay.

You choose how they pay their money. You takes your choice.

To Nokia. I'm giving back my loan Lumia 800 (cue tear), and the company is still hovering on the razor's edge. 'We have to conquer the US. Our plan B is plan A,' said Nokia SVP Victor Saeijs.

Plan A for the 4,000 staff to be sacked from the company's soon-to-be-closed Hungary, Mexico and Finland factories - shifting production to China - is get another job, however.

What's the frequency Kenneth?

But let's end, as we started, with Apple.

The next big thing is iPad 3; something everyone's expecting to boast a retina-resolution display. And for that reason, Apple's looking for developers who can provide appropriately impressive graphics -i.e. games.

Even if you're not at that level, changes to App Store submission process mean your screenshots have to be that big.

So - old jokes home - what's your new year's resolution?

2,048x1,536 sounds pretty nice.