The Steam Workshop's conversation is always about what is new. A game ships a big update, a wave of mods lands, the growth charts spike, and everyone watches the fresh releases fight for attention. That is the visible half. The invisible half is the back catalogue — and it is, by the numbers, the larger half of what actually gets installed.
Using ModSignal's live dataset, we measured the last seven days of subscriber movement across every mod we hold a baseline for. The result reframes where the Workshop's value really lives: most of this week's installs went to mods published long before this week.
What we can actually measure
Subscriber movement needs two readings — a current count and one from at least seven days ago. ModSignal's snapshot pipeline runs on a tiered rolling cadence, so on any given day roughly a fifth of the catalogue is refreshed. Over a week that covers 4,671,757 of the 6,018,062 active, subscribed mods (77.6%) with a genuine seven-day baseline. The rest are not "flat" — they simply were not re-read in time to produce a delta, and we exclude them rather than score them as zero.
Inside that measured set, 766,862 mods (16.4%) added at least one subscriber in the last seven days. The others were flat or falling. The week's net flow across the measured cohort was 35,510,265 subscriptions — and where those landed is the whole story.
The age of the install flow
Sort the measured catalogue by how old each mod is, and look at where this week's installs went:
| Age of the mod | Measured | Still gaining | Share of the week's installs | Median weekly gain (gaining mods) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 30 days | 44,265 | 36.96% | 5.32% | 11 |
| 30–90 days | 171,597 | 36.15% | 14.58% | 7 |
| 90–365 days | 687,404 | 23.39% | 23.73% | 5 |
| 1–3 years | 1,352,554 | 17.25% | 30.28% | 4 |
| 3–5 years | 967,320 | 13.40% | 13.19% | 4 |
| 5 years or older | 1,448,617 | 11.37% | 12.89% | 3 |
Two things stand out.
First, the 1-to-3-year band is the engine of the Workshop, taking 30.3% of every subscription installed this week — more than the 90-to-365-day band and more than half again as much as the entire under-90-day cohort combined. A mod in that window is past its launch, past its first wave, and still the single richest source of weekly installs on the platform.
Second, the age ladder in the "still gaining" column runs downward — 37% of brand-new mods are picking up subscribers this week, against 11.4% of mods older than five years. That is exactly what you would expect: a release is when a mod is most likely to be moving. The surprise is what happens after you multiply that falling rate by the enormous size of the older population.
The five-year test
Mods published before October 2021 — five years old or more — are 1,448,617 of the measured catalogue. Only 11.4% of them moved this week, but that is still 164,726 mods, and they collected 12.89% of every install on the platform. Roughly one in eight subscriptions installed this week went to a mod that is at least half a decade old.
Put another way: the 215,862 mods published in the last 90 days pulled in a combined 7.07M weekly subscriptions. The 1.45 million mods older than five years pulled in 4.58M — from a population more than six times the size, and at a fraction of the churn. The new releases win the spotlight; the veterans win the steady traffic.
And 68.8% of every mod gaining subscribers this week — 527,666 of 766,862 — was published more than a year ago. The Workshop is not a launch treadmill where only the newest things move. It is a long tail that keeps paying out.
The mix is different in every ecosystem
That platform-wide picture hides a wide spread. The share of each game's weekly installs that goes to mods under a year old ranges from essentially all of it to almost none:
| Game | Weekly installs | To mods <1 yr old | To mods 3 yrs+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wallpaper Engine | 5,941,478 | 35.8% | 17.9% |
| Project Zomboid | 5,779,264 | 57.0% | 11.3% |
| Garry's Mod | 2,762,964 | 38.5% | 32.7% |
| RimWorld | 1,549,253 | 38.8% | 30.3% |
| Left 4 Dead 2 | 1,537,227 | 33.2% | 31.3% |
| Counter-Strike 2 | 1,421,024 | 34.1% | 1.5% |
| Aimlabs | 1,346,734 | 30.7% | 40.2% |
| Cities: Skylines | 1,049,391 | 12.8% | 76.7% |
| DayZ | 636,095 | 46.4% | 26.1% |
| The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth | 605,199 | 30.5% | 51.9% |
| Teardown | 514,916 | 59.8% | 18.9% |
| Don't Starve Together | 449,669 | 27.1% | 55.8% |
| Euro Truck Simulator 2 | 390,454 | 41.6% | 36.5% |
Project Zomboid is a live-wave ecosystem — 57.0% of its weekly installs go to mods published in the last year, the highest concentration of any major game, a direct signature of the Build 42 push that has dominated its Workshop for months. Cities: Skylines is the opposite: 76.7% of its weekly installs land on mods at least three years old, and only 12.8% on anything newer. Its players are not waiting for 2026 content; they are running the same well-worn assets they have trusted for years.
Counter-Strike 2 is its own case. Only 1.5% of its weekly installs reach mods three years or older, and none of its top receivers are new releases either — its traffic is split between recent aim maps and a permanent floor of practice tools from 2023 that never stop being downloaded.
The workhorses doing the work
Sort the whole measured catalogue by weekly subscriptions and the top of the list is not a list of new releases:
| Mod | Game | Installs this week | Lifetime installs | Published |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aimlabs Quick Warm-Up | Aimlabs | 63,756 | 176,702 | 2026 |
| Custom_ClickingScope | Aimlabs | 63,018 | 200,905 | 2024 |
| Custom_Tracking100hz | Aimlabs | 54,807 | 851,880 | 2024 |
| 初音-AniLuoty | Wallpaper Engine | 54,271 | 493,949 | 2026 |
| Twoshot Entry ADS 30s | Aimlabs | 53,689 | 153,139 | 2026 |
| Aim Botz – Aim Training | Counter-Strike 2 | 52,038 | 13,585,835 | 2023 |
| 5e_playbook | Counter-Strike 2 | 50,704 | 109,107 | 2026 |
| NeatUI Framework [B42] | Project Zomboid | 45,599 | 1,294,736 | 2025 |
| CSStats Training Map (CSGOHUB) | Counter-Strike 2 | 42,461 | 6,246,058 | 2023 |
| 5e_aimhub | Counter-Strike 2 | 40,104 | 5,653,830 | 2023 |
The aim-training and practice maps own the very top of the weekly flow, and several of the 2026 entries are running hot enough to be startling: Aimlabs Quick Warm-Up added 36.1% of its entire lifetime installs in a single week, and the CS2 map 5e_playbook added 46.5%. These are not slow-burn veterans — they are live-service items caught mid-sprint, the mirror image of the back catalogue they are sitting beside.
How we measure
Weekly subscriber movement is the difference between each mod's current subscription count and its last recorded count at least seven days old, exactly as the platform computes a seven-day delta. Mods with no snapshot old enough to form that baseline are excluded, which is why the measured cohort (4.67M) is smaller than the full subscribed catalogue (6.02M); because the snapshot cadence is tiered rather than uniform, a mod's appearance in the measured set reflects our refresh schedule, not its popularity. A negative net change is clamped at zero here; we measure the flow of installs, not the net of installs minus uninstalls. For aim trainers and wallpaper utilities, the Workshop page is not the primary distribution channel, which is part of why their raw install counts sit so far above their listing traffic.
Why it matters
The instinct is to treat the Workshop as a launch machine — measure the first week, crown the breakout, move on. The data says the back catalogue is where the steady money is. For a studio planning DLC or a sequel, the 1-to-3-year band in your own game is the clearest read on which mechanics your players actually keep. For a creator, a mod that is still pulling installs three years later is a better signal than a launch spike that fades in a fortnight. And for anyone modelling the platform, the number to hold onto is simple: two thirds of the mods still gaining subscribers this week were published before this time last year.
Explore the live dataset to see the flow by game, or read how the stock of subscriptions concentrates in a fraction of the catalogue and how each week's new subscriptions pool into an even smaller set of winners.