There are two very different ways to measure a modding community. You can count mods, or you can count installs. A game with 200,000 tiny mods can look huge by volume yet hold far less actual reach than a game with 20,000 sprawling mods that millions of players use. As of September 2026, we ranked Steam Workshop's ecosystems the second way — by the total subscription reach of their mod scenes.
Using ModSignal's live dataset of 7.2 million active Workshop items across 401 tracked games, we measured the aggregate subscription volume of every game's mod community. Among the 320,747 active mods that have crossed 5,000 subscriptions, the total install base tops 10.7 billion — and that reach is concentrated in a remarkably small cluster of games.
This ranking answers a simple question: which games have the biggest actual modding communities, in the metric that matters most — combined installs?
The biggest modding communities by total subscription reach
Ranked by combined active subscriptions across all a game's mods with 5,000+ installs:
| Game | Large mods | Combined subscriptions |
|---|---|---|
| Wallpaper Engine | 46,765 | 1,774,422,622 |
| Garry's Mod | 39,423 | 1,419,369,135 |
| Cities: Skylines | 28,346 | 694,782,459 |
| Project Zomboid | 7,063 | 674,823,150 |
| Left 4 Dead 2 | 18,372 | 449,979,934 |
| Counter-Strike 2 | 3,000 | 409,333,712 |
| Aimlabs | 2,947 | 366,203,236 |
| RimWorld | 7,764 | 321,028,487 |
| DayZ | 3,406 | 288,087,904 |
| Don't Starve Together | 3,732 | 280,223,804 |
| Dota 2 | 1,113 | 217,022,438 |
| ARK: Survival Evolved | 2,843 | 177,349,820 |
| Euro Truck Simulator 2 | 4,412 | 137,283,761 |
| People Playground | 5,262 | 135,919,319 |
| Teardown | 3,525 | 122,882,056 |
Two ecosystems stand apart from everything else. Wallpaper Engine owns 1.77 billion combined subscriptions from nearly 47,000 large mods — a lead of over 350 million over its nearest rival. Garry's Mod is the only other community above one billion, with 1.42 billion. Together these two games hold about 30% of all subscription reach among large Workshop mods.
Why Wallpaper Engine wins on reach
Wallpaper Engine's dominance is a quirk of what it sells: an app whose entire purpose is a continuous wallpaper. Nearly every one of its 46,765 large mods is a downloadable animated or interactive wallpaper — and each is auto-subscribed the moment a user picks it. Its 84 mods that each hold over a million subscriptions (the most of any game tied with Project Zomboid) generate a phenomenal 141.7 million installs on their own. It is the rare Workshop ecosystem where mass-appeal utility meets near-zero friction.
The volume-versus-reach gap
The most interesting story here is how differently games sit under the two measurement schemes.
- Cities: Skylines has the third-largest combined subs (694M) from 28,346 large mods — a healthy, deep building/asset community.
- Counter-Strike 2 ranks sixth by install reach (409M) but with just 3,000 large mods — the highest average per-mod reach of any top-tier game. Each of its big mods averages ~136,000 subscriptions. That is the utility-mod effect: a handful of essential crosshair, config, and practice tooling mods that nearly every CS2 player uses.
- Aimlabs follows the same model — 2,947 big mods, 366M subs, ~124,000 per mod — because its Workshop is built on training routines players subscribe to once and keep.
- RimWorld and Project Zomboid are the depth communities: 7,764 and 7,063 large mods respectively, each averaging a shade under 100,000 subs per mod. Neither holds a single absurd megahit; both win through sustained, broad, high-quality output.
The mega-mod club
Focus on just the mods with one-million-plus subscriptions — the true blockbusters — and the picture sharpens:
| Game | 1M+ sub mods | Their combined installs |
|---|---|---|
| Project Zomboid | 129 | 217,848,062 |
| Garry's Mod | 97 | 156,188,136 |
| Wallpaper Engine | 84 | 141,710,530 |
| Counter-Strike 2 | 69 | 272,884,088 |
| Aimlabs | 57 | 170,308,337 |
| DayZ | 56 | 101,631,197 |
| Dota 2 | 47 | 132,896,847 |
| Don't Starve Together | 40 | 118,065,043 |
| Meccha Chameleon | 34 | 75,960,030 |
| ARK: Survival Evolved | 20 | 45,823,461 |
Counter-Strike 2 is the standout here despite ranking only sixth on broad reach: its 69 mega-mods hold 272 million installs — the highest combined total of any game's blockbuster tier. In sheer top-end install concentration, no community out-reaches CS2.
What this means for creators and builders
For a mod creator choosing where to publish, this ranking is a better signal than raw mod counts. Communities are deepest where reach already concentrates: Wallpaper Engine and Garry's Mod for volume/utility, RimWorld and Project Zomboid for sustained quality, CS2 and Aimlabs for per-mod efficiency. For anyone building modding tooling — marketplaces, analytics, discovery — the install base, not the item count, is who you're actually serving.
The data behind this article
All figures come from ModSignal's live database, which continuously snapshots Steam Workshop via the Steam Web API. "Large mods" = active items with 5,000+ subscriptions; "combined subscriptions" = the sum of those subscriptions per game. Counting only the 5,000+ tier (320,747 mods → 10.7 billion installs) keeps the ranking computationally tractable while still capturing essentially all meaningful reach — the deep long-tail of sub-5,000-install mods adds only a fraction of the volume. All numbers current as of September 2026.
To explore any ecosystem's rankings, track growth velocity, and discover rising creators before they top the charts, visit ModSignal.
ModSignal tracks 7.2 million Steam Workshop mods across 401 games in real time. Browse games, search mods, or check pricing for API access.