With the Pocket Gamer Awards 2012 winners revealed on Tuesday (they're being announced at a special event in San Francisco to coincide with this week's GDC), it seems appropriate to squeeze in a quick Q&A session with CocoaChina, one of the event's sponsors.

We tracked down CocoaChina's head of the US office, Lei Zhang, who dutifully fired over some in-depth answers while simultaneously getting ready for GDC.

Pocket Gamer: For the benefit of readers who may not be familiar with CocoaChina, could you give them an overview of who you are and what you do?

Lei Zhang: CocoaChina started as a personal blog of company founder Gary Liu about Mac development and later on grew into the largest iOS related forum and community in China. It currently hosts 120k registered members, 80 percent of which are iOS developers.

After receiving two rounds of funding from Northern Light Ventures, Steamboat and Sequoia Capital and creating the mega hit casual title Fishing Joy (50 million installs), the company is now evolving into a giant in the mobile gaming space in China, involving game development, publishing, engine technologies, developer community, and mobile advertising. (Think of it the GREE of China's mobile gaming.)

With the following core assets, CocoaChina can also help international developers to reach a large percentage of Chinese iOS and Android user base and monetise their games in China.

• Games in our portfolio have reached 50 million plus installs and 4 million daily active users (DAUs) in China and are growing rapidly.

• Our in-house ad network has reached 1.5 billion monthly impression and USD $1.2 million monthly ad revenue from local advertisers.

• We are an influential force in maintaining a healthy mobile app ecosystem in China. In addition to community, our effort includes assisting developers with anti-fraudulent practices in China to protect their revenue.

• We have successfully published games in China for public gaming companies such as NetDragon and very high profile games such as Space Tank. What's worth mentioning is that in the latter case, the publishing of Space Tank is in collaboration with Nixon Mobile, where we cover the greater China area while Nixon covers other markets worldwide.

• We work with international media outlets to introduce China's market to developers worldwide and vice versa. We are the proud provider of the Chinese and Japanese translation for the PocketGamer.biz Top 50 Developer 2012 and will start writing and maintaining a Chinese gaming industry related column on PG.biz.

• We are also the proud sponsor of the open-source cross-platform 2D engine project, cocos2d-x. The engine supports some most successful games in the world, such as Glu's recent hit Small Street and the Android version of Fishing Joy.

It's not easy for western audiences to get a real sense of what is happening in China (with regards to portable gaming). How would you categorise the state of the current Chinese mobile gaming market?

I won't reiterate the publicly available data such as the fact that China is the second largest smartphone market after US, with 900 million mobile users. But the following three areas are probably less known to western audiences.

Real revenue

In this interview, Hoolai (another top Chinese developer), met Inside Network to clarify that it was also victimised in the 'Black Card' scam. The firm revealed its revenue data in the chart in that article.

What's particularly interesting is that its daily revenue on 2/6 from China is $32,000 - and this is legitimate revenue (no significant Black Card effect), which translates to $1 million a month. This supports the claim that certain games monetise very well in China today and generate real, strong revenue.

Unknown risksOn the other hand, western developers must be aware there are unknown risks they must bear and are usually hard to mitigate if they are not physically in that market or have a strong and trust worthy local partner. Some examples are revenue loss caused by fraudulent credit card and connection time out for unknown reasons.

Android Market

To tap into the fast growing Android market in China is attempting but developers must face and overcome the high fragmentation problem to see any meaningful results.

Similarly, it would be interesting to get your take on how you perceive the western mobile gaming market. Aside from your perspective, are there key differences (or indeed similarities) between this and the domestic (Chinese) audience?

Human nature (adventure, curiosity, longing for speed, violence, etc) draws Chinese players and western players to some similar genres and titles, such as endless runners, racing games, action games, and puzzlers such as Angry Birds.

On the other hand, culture difference, recent and ancient history make Chinese players focus onto some different areas and themes. Take the evergreen San Guo (Three Kingdoms) title and the combat social genre, for instance.

Do you have any predictions for how you see CocoaChina and China's mobile gaming market evolve over the next five to ten years?

No doubt China will be a very solid mobile gaming market in terms of revenue. Revenue for top grossing titles in China store will be robustly comparable to their counter parts in US.

The overall revenue of mobile gaming industry in China becomes significant compared to traditional online gaming and web gaming industry, which supports more than half of the Chinese internet industry and half-dozen publicly traded companies.

Firstly, CocoaChina will keep playing its irreplaceable role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem in China's mobile Internet space.

Secondly, we are expecting to derive sustainable and well balanced revenue from game development, game publishing, and mobile app advertising, in a scale that is significant and respectable in the industry.

And for sure, Fishing Joy will reach a user base of 200 million.

Finally, why get involved with the Pocket Gamer Awards?

PG is an excellent source of information and very active force in the worldwide mobile gaming industry. CocoaChina has always been a strong partner with PG, such as the proud provider of Chinese and Japanese translation of the aforementioned PG.biz Top 50 Developers 2012.

We would like to get involved with activities such as the PG Award and get a chance to make more friends among international developers. We also would like to help international developers to know more about China through the PG platform.