Every Steam Workshop ecosystem has its dominant names. crashz in Counter-Strike 2. KI5 in Project Zomboid. Rubat in Garry's Mod. But how much of an ecosystem's total demand do those top creators actually capture? And does it matter?
Using ModSignal's live dataset of 6.77 million active Workshop items across 396 tracked games and 1.98 million creators, we can measure creator concentration directly: the share of total subscriptions held by the top 5 creators in each game. The result is a concentration spectrum that reveals as much about a game's community structure as raw subscription counts do about its popularity.
The most concentrated Workshop ecosystems
These are all Steam Workshop game ecosystems with over 50 million total subscriptions, ranked by the share held by the top 5 creators (higher = more concentrated):
| Game | Active creators | Total subs (M) | Top 5 share | Top 1 share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aimlabs | 1,955 | 372.9 | 73.3% | 23.2% |
| Counter-Strike 2 | 2,918 | 420.9 | 51.0% | 20.6% |
| House Flipper | 350 | 139.3 | 43.9% | 22.8% |
| Unturned | 1,325 | 85.2 | 34.1% | 13.0% |
| Civilization VI | 915 | 76.3 | 31.8% | 8.3% |
| Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic | 766 | 59.3 | 30.5% | 19.7% |
| MECCHA CHAMELEON | 461 | 120.7 | 28.6% | 8.9% |
| Paint the Town Red | 942 | 52.2 | 26.6% | 10.2% |
| Ravenfield | 835 | 68.3 | 25.8% | 10.9% |
| RimWorld | 4,706 | 342.7 | 23.5% | 14.3% |
| Dota 2 | 1,284 | 219.3 | 23.4% | 8.5% |
| Project Zomboid | 5,318 | 689.3 | 22.6% | 13.5% |
| ARK: Survival Evolved | 1,744 | 184.9 | 21.0% | 6.6% |
| Darkest Dungeon | 1,185 | 83.7 | 20.9% | 6.5% |
| The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth | 2,437 | 70.7 | 20.6% | 9.9% |
| The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim | 2,712 | 84.5 | 20.4% | 8.5% |
| Rust | 315 | 56.1 | 20.2% | 5.3% |
| Don't Starve Together | 3,605 | 289.6 | 20.0% | 10.1% |
| Arma 3 | 3,489 | 131.9 | 19.8% | 7.7% |
| DayZ | 2,707 | 298.2 | 17.1% | 6.6% |
The most distributed Workshop ecosystems
At the other end of the spectrum, demand is spread across thousands of creators. No single name dominates:
| Game | Active creators | Total subs (M) | Top 5 share | Top 1 share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wallpaper Engine | 23,022 | 1,903.9 | 5.7% | 1.4% |
| Left 4 Dead 2 | 8,359 | 531.3 | 6.2% | 1.4% |
| Tabletop Simulator | 7,615 | 82.7 | 6.4% | 1.4% |
| Garry's Mod | 21,497 | 1,539.1 | 6.8% | 2.2% |
| Euro Truck Simulator 2 | 3,047 | 155.8 | 9.3% | 2.5% |
| Cities: Skylines | 5,024 | 769.0 | 10.0% | 2.2% |
| Stormworks: Build and Rescue | 2,981 | 75.4 | 10.6% | 4.1% |
| Brick Rigs | 2,859 | 78.2 | 11.1% | 3.1% |
| Kenshi | 1,623 | 74.5 | 11.2% | 2.7% |
| Company of Heroes 2 | 2,297 | 84.6 | 11.4% | 2.8% |
The Aimlabs extreme: one ecosystem, five gatekeepers
Aimlabs is the most concentrated Workshop ecosystem in our dataset. Five creators hold 73.3% of all subscriptions. The top creator alone, with 401 published items and 86.6 million subscriptions, controls 23.2% of the entire game's install base. The second creator, with just 22 items, holds another 80.1 million (21.5%). Together, these two accounts for nearly 45% of all Aimlabs Workshop demand.
This is not a case where one viral hit distorts the numbers. The top five creators in Aimlabs each publish at volume — 401, 22, 1428, 314, and 215 items respectively. They have become the ecosystem's content infrastructure. A player searching for an Aimlabs Workshop mod is overwhelmingly likely to install something made by one of these five people, regardless of what they were looking for.
Counter-Strike 2: where utility creators become institutions
Counter-Strike 2 is the second most concentrated major ecosystem, with the top 5 creators holding 51% of all subscriptions. The pattern here is distinctive: the dominant creators are not content modders. They build tools.
crashz leads with 86.8 million subscriptions across just 15 items — crosshair generators, viewmodel adjusters, and config tools. Mr. uLLeticaL-S follows with 58.3 million from 13 items, almost entirely the Aim Botz training series. Yesber holds 36 million from 20 recoil-training maps. These are permanent-install utilities that competitive players keep for the lifetime of their CS2 installation.
The top creator in CS2 (crashz) holds 20.6% of the game's entire subscription base with only 15 mods. That ratio — outsized influence from a tiny portfolio — is the signature of a utility-dominated ecosystem where a few essential tools crowd out everything else.
Wallpaper Engine: the opposite extreme
Wallpaper Engine is the least concentrated major Workshop ecosystem. The top 5 creators hold just 5.7% of subscriptions. The single biggest creator holds only 1.4%. With 23,022 active creators and over 1.9 billion total subscriptions, Wallpaper Engine is the most democratized Workshop community we track.
The reason is structural. Wallpaper Engine's Workshop is a wallpaper marketplace. Every creator publishes wallpapers, and no single aesthetic, theme, or format can dominate because player taste is inherently fragmented. The top creator has 9.2 million subscriptions from a single item. That sounds large, but against a 1.9-billion-subscription ecosystem, it is 0.48% — one creator's best work reaches less than half a percent of the total demand.
This is the key distinction: in CS2, concentration reflects utility lock-in (players all need the same tools). In Wallpaper Engine, distribution reflects taste fragmentation (players all want different wallpapers). Both are healthy ecosystems, but they reward completely different creator strategies.
Garry's Mod: massive but distributed
Garry's Mod has 21,497 active creators and 1.54 billion total subscriptions — the second-largest Workshop ecosystem after Wallpaper Engine. Yet its top 5 creators hold only 6.8% of demand. The biggest name, Rubat, holds 2.2% with 13.9 million subscriptions across 8 items.
Garry's Mod is the clearest case of a game whose Workshop is so large and so diverse that concentration becomes impossible. The sandbox nature of the game means there are hundreds of content categories — roleplay servers, weapon packs, vehicle packs, ragdolls, maps, tools — each with its own creator hierarchy. No one can dominate all of them.
What concentration tells studios
For studios evaluating Workshop ecosystems, the concentration metric answers a different question than subscription volume or conversion rate. It tells you who holds the leverage.
High-concentration games (top 5 > 30%)
These are ecosystems where a small number of creators function as infrastructure. If you are a studio looking at Aimlabs or Counter-Strike 2, the partnership landscape is narrow but deep. There are 5 names that matter. Reaching them means reaching most of the game's install base. Missing them means reaching almost no one.
The risk: if any of those top creators disengages, stops updating, or conflicts with the studio, a large share of the player experience is affected. The ecosystem is mature but fragile.
Low-concentration games (top 5 < 10%)
These are ecosystems where demand is distributed across a long tail of creators. Wallpaper Engine, Garry's Mod, and Left 4 Dead 2 fit this pattern. For studios, this means no single creator partnership moves the needle. The strategy here is breadth — working with many creators, supporting the platform as a whole, or seeding your own content into the distributed demand flow.
The opportunity: a single new creator can still break through. The top of the leaderboard is not locked in. In distributed ecosystems, a well-made mod has a realistic chance of capturing meaningful share because no incumbent holds a structural advantage.
The single-creator indicator
The "top 1 share" column in the rankings above isolates the most extreme form of concentration: how much of an ecosystem's demand is held by one person.
- House Flipper: one creator holds 22.8% with 3,897 items. This is a volume strategy — one person publishing at industrial scale.
- Counter-Strike 2: one creator (crashz) holds 20.6% with 15 items. This is a utility strategy — one person building the tools everyone needs.
- Wallpaper Engine: one creator holds 1.4%. No one-person risk exists.
A high top-1 share combined with a low mod count (like CS2's crashz) is the signal to watch. It means the ecosystem depends on a single creator's small portfolio. If that creator's content breaks, the ecosystem feels it.
A high top-1 share with a high mod count (like House Flipper) is less fragile. The creator's influence is spread across many items, so no single item's failure affects the whole.
How we measure
All figures come from the ModSignal live dataset, which continuously discovers and snapshots Steam Workshop items, creators, and subscription counts. Creator concentration is calculated as the share of total subscriptions held by the top 5 creators (by total subscriptions) within each game ecosystem, using only active items with more than 1,000 subscriptions to filter out inactive and test entries. The dataset refreshes continuously as new items are discovered and existing items are re-snapshotted, so these figures shift over time — the ranking reflects a current snapshot.
Why this matters
Subscription counts tell you how big a Workshop ecosystem is. Conversion rates tell you how efficiently it turns browsers into subscribers. Creator concentration tells you who holds the power.
For studios building community strategy, evaluating creator partnerships, or assessing the risk landscape of a Workshop ecosystem, concentration is the missing dimension. A game with 500 million subscriptions and 20% top-5 concentration presents a completely different opportunity than a game with the same volume and 70% concentration. The first is a wide-open field. The second is a walled garden with five gatekeepers.
ModSignal tracks this concentration continuously, across every game in our dataset, alongside subscription velocity, creator portfolios, and breakout signals. The goal is the same as always: help studios see the full shape of Workshop demand, not just the volume.