Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds tops King of the Kill as Steam’s latest flavor of the month

The PC gaming community on Steam often moves from one game to another as a group, and where that used to mean survival games like Day Z, Rust, and Ark: Survival Evolved, it now means online multiplayer battle royale games where players fight until one person is standing like in the 1999 Japanese novel and the 2000 film Battle Royale.

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is the most-played game on Steam that isn’t from Valve Software (which owns the Steam service). It’s at 60,500 simultaneous players and growing, according to the Steam Stats site, putting it ahead of perennial favorites like Rocket League and Grand Theft Auto V.  And it has made $11 million on Steam in its first three days after launching into Early Access on March 23, according to Bluehole More important, it is also ahead of publisher Daybreak’s H1Z1: King of the Kill, which was the previous top non-Valve game on Steam as well as the champion of the battle royale genre.