BEIJING — Overseas markets have become increasingly important to Chinese mobile games developers as they account for a growing share of the industry's revenue, a research report showed.

In 2018, the revenue of China's mobile gaming industry from overseas markets totaled 42.12 billion yuan ($5.94 billion), up 30.8 percent year-on-year, according to iResearch, a market research company.

Overseas markets made up 25.4 percent of the total revenue for China's mobile gaming industry, rising by 3.1 percentage points compared with 2017, the report said.

The most popular Chinese mobile gaming categories in the first half of this year included MMORPG, action and puzzle games. Brazil was among the regions that saw the biggest increase by the measure of how many products launched by Chinese mobile games developers during the period.

China's domestic market experienced a temporary hiatus when authorities tightened regulations toward the mobile gaming industry in 2018, which partly explained the expansion of Chinese mobile games among overseas markets, the report said.

iResearch said that the United States and the European Union (EU) are the regions that would see rapid growth in the short run, as mobile games account for less than 30 percent of the whole gaming industry's revenue in both markets, while that percentage in both China and Japan exceeded 60 percent.

In addition, both the United States and the EU already amassed a huge quantity of game users and saw widespread use of smart mobile devices and mobile network.

The report estimated that mobile games would account for more than half of the global games market by 2021, thanks to the development of technologies such as 5G and cloud services.