The Steam Workshop's Churn Economy (2026): 134,000 Mods Are Losing Subscribers Right Now

The Steam Workshop's entire analyst economy — ours included — is obsessed with the breakout. Every leaderboard, every momentum chart, every "fastest-growing mods" list answers one question: who is winning the next install? It is a valuable question, and it is only half of the market.

The other half is the churn economy: the mods that are actively losing subscribers. They are not abandoned (we covered that separately). They are installed in the hundreds of thousands or millions, and they are bleeding — slowly unwinding as their player base moves on, their game updates past them, or their creator declares them obsolete.

Using ModSignal's live market-intelligence graph, here is the shape of that churn in 2026: how many mods are losing, how fast, and which ecosystems are bleeding the hardest.

The scale of churn: 2.7% of the catalog is bleeding right now

Of the 4,965,593 active mods ModSignal measured over the last 7 days, 134,781 are net-losing subscribers. That is 2.7% of the catalog losing, not flat, not growing — actively shedding installs.

Most of those are small, gentle retreats. But the tail is sharp:

• 19,171 mods lost more than 1% of their subscriber base in a week.
• 3,477 mods lost more than 5% in a week.

For perspective, a mod losing 5% of its subscribers in a week is decaying at a pace that, if sustained, halves its install base in about three months. That is not a wobble; it is a structural decline.

Wallpaper Engine is bleeding hardest — as a share of its catalog

The most striking concentration is Wallpaper Engine. 3,085 of its 5,982 measured mods are losing subscribers — 51.6% of the catalog. No other large ecosystem comes close to that share.

This is the mirror image of Wallpaper Engine's fame. It is the Workshop's convert-everything-to-subscribe machine: wallpapers are cheap, replaceable, and infinitely re-authored. A wallpaper that was the best in its niche six months ago gets superseded constantly — and when a newer, better wallpaper arrives, the old one doesn't just stagnate, it loses the subscribers who swap. High churn is baked into the category.

By raw count, the big churners are the big modding games:

RimWorld, Call of Duty, and People Playground all sit above 25% — more than one in four of their measured mods is losing ground. These are not dead catalogs; they are active, content-rich ecosystems where the renewal pressure on any single mod is intense.

Project Zomboid's Build 42 is deleting six-figure mods in real time

The sharpest single story is Project Zomboid. The Build 42 update migration we've documented before has a second, darker face: mods that were built for Build 41 — and have not been updated for Build 42 — are now explicitly marked obsolete by their own creators and are losing subscribers at 4–6% a week, while still holding five- and six-figure install bases.

The top losers among Project Zomboid's big mods are all deprecation-tagged:

• boredom-tweaks (outdated, don't install) — 84,151 subs, −5.75%/wk
• B42 Sleep On It (outdated, don't install) — 66,492 subs, −5.73%/wk
• outdated Become Brave B42 — 51,979 subs, −5.58%/wk
• new EllRoy — 68,295 subs, −5.17%/wk
• 41 Better Smashed Head Sounds — 76,724 subs, −5.16%/wk
• all mushroom models — 67,504 subs, −5.15%/wk
• B42 offroad go brrr (B41) — 156,888 subs, −5.00%/wk
• Constown — 123,079 subs, −4.80%/wk

A single 120,000-subscriber mod losing 4.8% a week is shedding ~5,700 users per week — the equivalent of a mid-size standalone game's daily active base, disappearing every week, from a mod that is technically still installed on 120,000 machines. The Build 42 migration is not just minting breakouts; it is simultaneously running a very visible liquidation of the mods it left behind.

Deprecation shows up in the title — and it's a quiet signal of death

Across the whole Workshop, the clearest predictor of active churn among big mods is a title that admits obsolescence. Of the large (20,000+ subscriber) mods currently losing subscribers, a striking fraction carry deprecation flags right in their names — and some are enormous:

• 87 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ60 (working/outdated) — 1,439,858 subs, −0.60%/wk
• Deprecated Portal Gun: Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device — 1,420,934 subs, −0.19%/wk
• 89 Land Rover Defender 110 (working/outdated) — 1,274,971 subs, −1.07%/wk
• outdated cache smoke practice — 1,112,970 subs, −0.08%/wk
• 85 Mercedes-Benz W123 (working/outdated) — 977,693 subs, −0.11%/wk
• 89 Land Rover Defender 90 (working/outdated) — 975,952 subs, −0.82%/wk
• outdated Enhanced Blood Textures — 880,633 subs, −0.05%/wk
• Deprecated Wells Construction — 400,912 subs, −3.27%/wk

Here is the uncomfortable truth these million-subscriber mods expose: even a mod with over a million installs can be in the churn economy. It decays slower than a 120k Project Zomboid mod (large mods with deep historical installs shed at low single-digit rates), but it is still decaying. The churn curve does not respect size — it respects whether the mod still matches its game's current state.

Why the churn economy matters more than growth

Growth lists are easy to misread. A mod that gains 100,000 subscribers this week is celebrated — but if its peer is losing 120,000, the ecosystem as a whole is contracting even as the leaderboard glows green.

The churn economy is the truer measure of ecosystem health. It tells you:

1. When a game updates, its old mods lose, not just its new mods win. The Build 42 wave is the clearest current example, but it applies everywhere — a game that ships a major patch is a game that begins systematically deleting the mods built for the previous version.
2. Churn share is a category property, not a quality signal. Wallpaper Engine's 51.6% churn share is not because its mods are bad; it is because wallpapers are replaceable by nature. If you are evaluating a storefront or an ecosystem, churn share reveals how disposable its content is.
3. Deprecation is an explicit, findable signal. Creators who mark their own mods "outdated" or "no longer supported" are giving you the best leading indicator of decline — better than any velocity chart. A workshop that accumulates deprecation-tagged million-subscriber mods is a workshop whose catalog is aging in public.

The takeaway

The Steam Workshop does not only mint breakouts — it runs a continuous liquidation. Every week, 134,000+ mods lose subscribers, 19,000 lose more than 1%, and 3,500 lose more than 5%. Whole six-figure mods are being deprecated in real time by the update cycles that created them.

For a creator, the churn economy is a different kind of calibration: surviving is not the same as winning. A mod that merely avoids decline in an ecosystem shedding 25% of its catalog is doing as much as one that grows in a hot one. For anyone trying to read the Workshop's real temperature, stop watching only the winners — watch who is quietly losing the installs they already won.