Subscriptions are the loudest number in the Steam Workshop — they tell you how many players installed a mod. Favorites are quieter, but they answer a different question: how many players plan to come back to it.
A favorite is a bookmark. It is a player saying "I want to find this again," whether to re-download it, to check for updates, or to keep it in their curated list. Where a subscription decays into an unused install, a favorite is a standing vote of intent. It is the closest thing the Workshop has to a loyalty signal.
Pulling from ModSignal's live dataset of 6.9 million active Workshop items across 396 tracked games, the active mods in our dataset have accumulated roughly 746 million favorites — against over 12 billion subscriptions across the platform. That aggregate, about one favorite for every sixteen subscriptions, is the Workshop's hidden engagement layer.
But the aggregate hides a dramatic split. Which game ecosystems generate the most bookmarks, and more importantly — which generate the most bookmarks per subscription? That ratio is the real signal: it reveals games where mods are treated as collections to return to, versus games where mods are installed and forgotten.
The most-favorited Steam Workshop game ecosystems
Ranked by total accumulated favorites across all active mods in that game:
| Game | Active mods | Total favorites | Total subscriptions | Favorites per 100 subs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wallpaper Engine | 104,932 | 211,761,198 | 1,913,998,889 | 11.1 |
| Left 4 Dead 2 | 144,757 | 102,813,884 | 558,670,207 | 18.4 |
| Garry's Mod | 172,232 | 95,334,677 | 1,568,038,009 | 6.1 |
| Cities: Skylines | 116,629 | 31,981,316 | 784,762,028 | 4.1 |
| RimWorld | 56,521 | 24,593,031 | 351,852,868 | 7.0 |
| Project Zomboid | 48,016 | 24,399,971 | 695,359,765 | 3.5 |
| Aimlabs | 54,837 | 18,742,168 | 375,635,373 | 5.0 |
| Dota 2 | 47,656 | 14,143,931 | 219,838,064 | 6.4 |
| Don't Starve Together | 21,122 | 10,891,954 | 292,749,903 | 3.7 |
| The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim | 26,691 | 9,682,323 | 88,815,379 | 10.9 |
| Arma 3 | 74,535 | 9,319,298 | 140,002,254 | 6.7 |
| Starbound | 13,958 | 8,877,670 | 53,906,867 | 16.5 |
| Team Fortress 2 | 46,894 | 8,852,412 | 6,175,655 | 143.3 |
| ARK: Survival Evolved | 19,570 | 8,810,764 | 187,085,385 | 4.7 |
| Hearts of Iron IV | 48,902 | 7,718,066 | 70,075,737 | 11.0 |
| Ravenfield | 20,453 | 7,011,090 | 70,902,757 | 9.9 |
| XCOM 2 | 11,547 | 6,834,694 | 88,585,898 | 7.7 |
Wallpaper Engine is in a league of its own at 211.8 million favorites — more than twice the next ecosystem. That is because wallpapers are inherently re-visitable: users build a rotating playlist of wallpapers they cycle through every day, so bookmarking is central to the experience.
The bookmark ratios that reveal true return intent
Total favorites reward sheer install volume. The favorites-per-subscription ratio isolates the games where a high share of mods earns a bookmark — the strongest evidence of repeat engagement.
Here is where the ranking flips. Left 4 Dead 2 posts the strongest ratio among the big ecosystems at 18.4 favorites per 100 subscriptions (0.18 per sub). Animation and gameplay-overhaul packs in L4D2 get re-sought by server communities and content creators who rebuild loadouts, making them heavily favorited relative to their install count.
Wallpaper Engine sits at 11.1 per 100 — high for its enormous scale. Skyrim (10.9) and Hearts of Iron IV (11.0) cluster just behind, both games with deep, modular mod scenes where players curate stable loadouts and return to them for years.
At the other extreme, Project Zomboid (3.5), City: Skylines (4.1), and ARK (4.7) have the leanest ratios among major ecosystems — tens of millions of subscriptions that rarely convert into a bookmark, suggesting a more install-once-then-forget behavior.
The single most-favorited mods
Drilling into individual items, the most-favorited mods are led by wallpapers and animation packs:
- "Perfect Wallpaper" (Wallpaper Engine) — 353,203 favorites, 9.16M subscriptions
- "囍" (Wallpaper Engine) — 291,790 favorites, 3.09M subscriptions
- "Aeolian by WLOP" (Wallpaper Engine) — 264,585 favorites, 2.89M subscriptions
- "xdReanimsBase (L4D2) Anim Mods base" — 277,668 favorites, 3.22M subscriptions
Wallpaper Engine claims most of the top individual slots, again reflecting how re-visitability drives bookmarking. But Left 4 Dead 2's animation base at 277K favorites on 3.2M subs reinforces the L4D2 ratio story — a mod that a huge share of its audience chooses to keep bookmarked.
What this means for mod creators
Favorites are a leading indicator that subscriptions alone hide. A mod pulling an outsized favorites-per-subscription ratio within its game is earning a loyal audience that returns to it — exactly the kind of signal that predicts sustained installs and update engagement.
For the games themselves, the ratio is a health check on how their Workshop is being used. Wallpaper Engine, Left 4 Dead 2, and Skyrim are ecosystems built around curation and return visits. Project Zomboid's and ARK's lean ratios suggest large but more transient install bases — a gap that creators who build re-visitable, modular content can exploit.
Explore the live numbers for yourself across the mod catalog — pick any game's page and sort by favorites to see which mods in that ecosystem carry the bookmark signal.