Steam reveals 2017's biggest earners, including The Witcher 3, H1Z1 and PUBG

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Divinity: Original Sin 2 also among the games that generated the most revenue last year.

Steam has released its annual list of the highest-earning games of the year, and it includes one or two surprises. Among the 12 games that generated the most revenue in 2017 sits Ghost Recon Wildlands, for example, which I wouldn't have expected. The overall biggest earners also include evergreen titles like The Witcher 3, Rocket League and Counter Striker: Global Offensive. 

To compile the list, Valve looked at game sales, in-game transactions, and DLC. It took the top 100 (the full list is here) and split them into tiers: platinum for the top 12, gold for the next group, and so on. That means there's no actual ranking—we just know roughly where each game placed. The top 12 earners, in full, were:

Valve also published a list of the highest-earning new games of 2017, split by month of their release. That list, which you view here, contains some more obscure titles that might be worth looking up (I didn't know anything about space sandbox Avorion until now, for example).

You can also click here for a list of the top earning VR titles (including Superhot VR and Fallout 4 VR), and here for the most played games of 2017, grouped together by the maximum number of simultaneous players they achieved. Nothing, of course, came close to PUBG in that regard. If you're interested, Valve wrote a blog post outlining the methodology for each group.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.