According to Jeff Lyndon, one of the biggest spenders on iDreamsky's games in China was from a coal mining town.

Just 33% of the Android market in China is based in the four big international cities. The rest is out in tier two and tier three cities, where there's less information about new games, and fewer things to spend disposable income on.

Less distraction means much better user retention.

In a packed auditorium at Pocket Gamer Connects, Lyndon highlighted some of the main differences between Western and Chinese purchasers, and how tailoring your game for the Eastern market can mean the difference between success and failure.

File size matters

And if you're aiming at that less affluent part of the population, there are lots of other things to take into consideration as well.

In China a 5GB data contract costs 15% of the average monthly salary. Most gamers are on 100MB contracts, meaning they need to be much more frugal about what they can download.

If your game is 70MB, hardly a massive size in the West, then you're taking up 70 percent of a person's monthly usage. If your online game uses 5MB of data an hour, that's another hefty chunk of the contract that's eaten up.

Piracy what I did there

As well as the differences in audience, Lyndon highlighted one of the most prevalent points that's come out of the East meets West track at the conference - even if you're not in China, your games are.

Any game that hits the Google Play Store hits the Chinese markets shortly after. Lyndon used Fruit Ninja, prior to iDreamsky publishing it in China, as an example.

1 hour after launch 30 sites already had pirated versions of the game up. Within ten days it was more than 200. After three months there was one clone. After a year there were 40.

And Lyndon rounded off his talk with a pretty stark statement, that could well serve as a tagline for the whole track: "ignoring China means you're creating a bigger problem for yourself later on."