It's no secret that PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been a phenomenal success, breaking both sales and concurrent player records during the last 12 months. But how does it compare to other Steam titles across the platform's history? According to Gabe Newell (via PC Gamer), PUBG is the third highest earning game ever on Steam.

Speaking during an interview yesterday, Valve's CEO talked about how his company's hardware and software research has helped the games industry. "So you can have a relatively new game like PUBG, and because they can capitalize on all the other multiplayer games, the technology, the fact that China is now a huge market for anybody who does PC game development---So PUBG can come out of pretty much nowhere and become the third largest selling game in Steam's history. Their gross revenue over all time is already number three in fairly short order."

After spending nine months in Steam's Early Access program, PUBG got its full release back in December, which makes Newell's revelation even more amazing. We don't know which games are above it on the highest-earners list, but they're likely to be titles that have been around for a while, such as Dota 2.

China, as Newell mentions, is a huge market for PUBG, and its influence has been affecting the monthly Steam hardware surveys. The game is so popular in the country that simplified Chinese is now the most common language among Steam players, while Windows 7, which is still used by many in the Asian nation, remains the most popular OS.

As for Valve's gaming efforts, the company is finally going to start making its own titles again, instead of focusing solely on technology and hardware. It has several new games planned but has so far only revealed details of Dota 2 card game Artifact.