The Steam Workshop is usually talked about in terms of what's new — breakout mods, fresh creators, this month's launches. But the single most remarkable fact about it is the opposite: the oldest mods are still the biggest. A decade after their creators first clicked "publish," the top of the Workshop's demand chart is still held by files written in 2012, 2013, and 2014.
Using ModSignal's live dataset of 6.79 million active Workshop items across 401 tracked games, we isolated every active mod first published before 2015 and measured how much demand that decade-old tail still captures.
The Workshop's oldest mods are its most durable
There are 136,565 active mods on the Workshop today that were published before 2015 — they're at least eleven years old. Most of them are quiet: fewer than 1,663 (1.2%) still exceed 100,000 subscriptions.
But the survivors aren't just hanging on. They dominate:
| Mod | Created | Age (2026) | Subscriptions |
|---|---|---|---|
| crashz' Crosshair Generator | Aug 2014 | 12 yrs | 39,760,204 |
| Aim Botz – Training | Mar 2014 | 12 yrs | 24,378,343 |
| crashz' Viewmodel Generator | Dec 2014 | 12 yrs | 12,215,913 |
| Minimap HUD | Nov 2014 | 12 yrs | 8,308,216 |
| Geometric Placement | Dec 2014 | 12 yrs | 7,462,847 |
| training_aim_csgo2 | Jan 2014 | 13 yrs | 6,979,752 |
| PropHunt (Hide'n'Seek) – Original | Mar 2013 | 13 yrs | 6,185,690 |
| Pudge Wars | Dec 2014 | 12 yrs | 5,141,539 |
| Skillshot Wars | Nov 2014 | 12 yrs | 4,035,370 |
The headliner: crashz' Crosshair Generator, a Counter-Strike utility first published on August 31, 2014 — exactly twelve years ago — is still the single most-subscribed item in the entire dataset at 39.8 million installs. It hasn't been updated since 2023, but it keeps pulling crosshair-setting demand that most modern mods can only dream of.
Where the decade-old tail concentrates
The oldest durable hits cluster in exactly three ecosystems:
- Counter-Strike 2 — competitive utility mods are timeless. crosshair, aim-training, and viewmodel tools from the CS:GO era (2014) simply never stopped being needed, even as the game itself migrated to CS2. Five of the top ten oldest-and-biggest mods are CS2 tools.
- Garry's Mod — the sandbox classic. Murder, PropHunt, M9K weapons packs, gm_bigcity: these 2012–2013 contraptions remain staples of GMod servers more than a decade on, because the game is the durable part and the mods are its vocabulary.
- Don't Starve Together — QoL mods like Minimap HUD and Geometric Placement, published in late 2014, still top the demand chart because they solve permanent problems no update removes. Smarter Crock Pot (2.09M), Display Food Values (3.53M), Wormhole Marks (3.51M) all live on.
Dota 2 also keeps a decade-old custom-game tail alive (Pudge Wars 5.1M, Skillshot Wars 5.0M), and ARK carries Awesome SpyGlass at 6.07M since 2018.
The pattern: utility outlives novelty
What every 10-year-old megahit has in common is that it solves a permanent, repeatable problem rather than riding a one-off novelty wave:
- Crosshair tools — the same player needs a crosshair today as in 2014.
- HUD/placement quality-of-life — DST players will always want to see food freshness.
- Server staples — GMod communities rely on the same core game-modes forever.
- Training utilities — aim improvement is a constant, not a fad.
Compare that to the vast majority of the 136,565 pre-2015 mods that did fade: they were tied to a specific meta, a transient trend, or a creator who moved on. Durability is a design choice as much as a data pattern.
What this means for studios and creators
- For creators: build tools, not trends. A crosshair generator published in 2014 still out-earns 99.9% of the Workshop because it solved a permanent need. The highest-lifetime-value Workshop items are the ones that stay useful long after launch week.
- For studios: your longest-lived community assets are ancient. The mods your most loyal players depend on may predate half your dev team. Keeping APIs stable for a 12-year-old tool is cheap insurance against breaking an entire ecosystem.
- For ModSignal users: staying power is a separate signal from raw installs. A mod with 39.8M subs and a 2014 birthdate tells a different story than a breakout that hit 1M in a week. We track both — velocity and durability — so you can tell a flash from a foundation.
How we measure
All figures come from the ModSignal live dataset of the Steam Workshop. "Active" means currently indexed and not removed. Age windows use each item's original creation timestamp (time_created); the "pre-2015" cohort covers mods with a creation date before 2015-01-01, making them 11+ years old at the 2026-08-31 snapshot. Subscription figures reflect current subscriptions_current.
This is the data ModSignal tracks daily to spot both the next breakout and the durable foundations that keep working for a decade. Explore the live dataset to see which mods hold their demand longest, or compare game ecosystems directly.