The Biggest Steam Workshop Games by Mod Count (2026): 7.6 Billion Subscriptions, Ranked

The Steam Workshop is the largest repository of community-created game content in the world — but its scale is easy to underestimate. Pulling from ModSignal's dataset of 80 tracked games, 3.5 million active mods, and 1.06 million creators, we can rank exactly which game ecosystems carry the most player-created content and, more importantly, where the demand actually concentrates.

In total, the active mods in our dataset have accumulated 7.6 billion subscriptions.

The Steam Workshop games with the most mods

These are the largest modding ecosystems on Steam, measured by total published Workshop items:

Garry's Mod dominates

Garry's Mod is the clear outlier, sitting just shy of two million Workshop items — nearly double the second-largest ecosystem. This is no accident. As a physics sandbox with no fixed gameplay, GMod turns every uploaded contraption, map, and addon into a reason to return. Its Workshop is effectively the game's content engine, and the subscription numbers reflect a deeply engaged creator base.

Portal 2 crosses the million mark

Portal 2 is the second and final game above one million items. Its puzzle-creation tools and the legacy of the Portal community give it a durable long tail of maps and chambers that players keep installing years after launch.

Why raw counts understate demand

Item count alone misses the real signal. Subscription volume — how many players actually install and keep a mod — is where demand concentrates:

• Cities: Skylines — a city-builder with far fewer total items than Garry's Mod (about 371k) — accounts for 715 million subscriptions among its tracked active mods, the most of any ecosystem we measure.
• Counter-Strike 2 follows at 416 million subscriptions across its tracked mods, driven by a handful of aim-training and crosshair tools used by millions of players.
• The most-subscribed single Workshop item in our dataset, crashz' Crosshair Generator, has been installed 39.8 million times — more than most commercial games sell.

This is the core insight for studios and creators: a smaller ecosystem with high per-item engagement can be more commercially interesting than a huge one. ModSignal tracks both dimensions so the demand signal is never flattened into a single count.

How we measure

All figures come from the ModSignal live dataset, which tracks games, mods, creators, and subscription movement on the Steam Workshop. Item counts reflect total published Workshop items; subscription figures cover active mods currently tracked in the dataset. Because new mods are published continuously, totals grow over time — the ranking reflects a snapshot and is updated as the Workshop graph refreshes.

Why this matters for product and partnership decisions

For studios, the Workshop is a live demand graph, not a community afterthought:

• Content gaps — a fast-growing mod can reveal a feature or theme players want that the base game doesn't provide.
• Creator partnerships — a creator with repeated durable traction is a stronger partner than one viral hit.
• Localization and DLC research — which categories gain momentum first often signals where to invest.

Explore the live dataset to see how these numbers move over time, or compare games directly.