Every conversation about the Steam Workshop starts with subscriptions — the number that tells you a mod won. But before a single subscription happens, a mod has to be seen. Views are the Workshop's front door, the first and only filter between a mod existing and a mod being discovered. And the data shows that door is almost never opened.
Using ModSignal's live snapshot history across 4.8 million tracked Steam Workshop mods, we measured the 7-day view distribution for every item. The result is a discovery economy that is even more lopsided than the subscription concentration we measured earlier. Most active mods are not merely underperforming — they are effectively invisible.
94% of active mods get zero views in a week
In the most recent measured week, 4,512,405 of 4,815,111 tracked mods — 93.7% — received zero views. Not low views. Zero. No one clicked, no one hovered, no one even landed on the page.
That leaves just 302,706 mods (6.3%) that got any discovery at all. And even among that already-tiny cohort, the attention is razor-thin:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Tracked mods | 4,815,111 |
| Mods with zero views (7d) | 4,512,405 (93.7%) |
| Mods with any views (7d) | 302,706 (6.3%) |
| Median views among viewed mods | 5 |
| Mods with ≥100 views (7d) | 26,669 |
| Mods with ≥1,000 views (7d) | 4,361 |
| Mods with ≥10,000 views (7d) | 403 |
Read the median line again: the typical mod that gets any attention at all earns just 5 views in a week. Five people looked at it. The Workshop is not a marketplace where most mods compete and a few win — it is a lottery where 94% of tickets are never even drawn.
Discovery is hoarded by a microscopic slice
When we rank the 302,706 viewed mods by weekly views, the concentration is extreme:
| Band | Share of all weekly views |
|---|---|
| Top 10 mods | 2.8% |
| Top 0.1% | 26.2% |
| Top 1% | 60.8% |
The top 1% of viewed mods — roughly 3,000 items out of 4.8 million — captured 60.8% of all weekly discovery. The top 0.1% alone took more than a quarter. Meanwhile the bottom ~99% of the catalog splits the remaining 39% of views, with most of those getting single-digit attention.
The single most-viewed mod last week was Vanilla Outfits Expanded (Project Zomboid) at 203,947 views — more than the combined weekly views of the bottom ~4.4 million mods. One mod out-earned the entire long tail of the platform in discovery.
Views don't guarantee subscriptions
Discovery is necessary but not sufficient. Of the 302,706 mods that got any views last week, 122,984 (40.6%) converted zero of those views into a subscription. People looked, and moved on.
The other side: 59.4% of viewed mods converted at least one view into a subscription. So the funnel is brutal at every stage — most mods are never seen, and of the few that are, two in five still fail to convert a single install.
The discovery lottery by game
The zero-view share varies dramatically by ecosystem. Games with huge, fast-moving catalogs bury their long tail hardest:
| Game | Tracked mods | Zero views (7d) | Zero-view share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stick Fight: The Game | 39,932 | 39,932 | 100.0% |
| Duck Game | 41,486 | 41,221 | 99.4% |
| The Escapists 2 | 20,036 | 19,870 | 99.2% |
| Rust | 121,924 | 120,572 | 98.9% |
| Scrap Mechanic | 92,919 | 90,367 | 97.3% |
| Planet Zoo | 92,836 | 88,871 | 95.7% |
| Portal 2 | 24,156 | 23,013 | 95.3% |
| Counter-Strike 2 | 32,147 | 29,403 | 91.5% |
| DayZ | 24,028 | 21,634 | 90.0% |
| A Dance of Fire and Ice | 24,846 | 22,194 | 89.3% |
| Tabletop Simulator | 20,080 | 17,135 | 85.3% |
| Garry's Mod | 29,937 | 24,461 | 81.7% |
Rust is the starkest case: 98.9% of its 121,924 tracked mods got zero views in a week — and only 1 mod crossed 1,000 views. A game with one of the largest Workshop catalogs on the platform is also one of the most invisible. Garry's Mod, by contrast, is the healthiest of the large ecosystems at 81.7% zero-view — still a lottery, but with a meaningfully larger slice of its catalog getting discovered.
What this means for creators
The practical takeaway is blunt: publishing a mod is not the same as distributing it. In 2026, the Steam Workshop's default state for a new mod is invisibility. The mods that get seen are overwhelmingly the ones that already have momentum — the top-viewed items last week were dominated by Project Zomboid's Build 42 wave and a handful of established CS2 training maps:
| Mod | Game | Weekly views | Weekly subs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vanilla Outfits Expanded | Project Zomboid | 203,947 | 204,458 |
| This Is Your Life [B42] | Project Zomboid | 100,807 | 49,780 |
| PZ Pulse | Project Zomboid | 80,440 | 52,515 |
| External Item Descriptions | The Binding of Isaac | 64,241 | 65,826 |
| Aim Botz – Aim Training | Counter-Strike 2 | 63,173 | 179,857 |
| GoM – Guns of Marz [B42] | Project Zomboid | 59,544 | 90,289 |
Discovery compounds. The mods that get seen get subscribed, which pushes them up the ranking, which gets them seen more. For a new creator, the Workshop's organic loop is not a level playing field — it is a flywheel that only starts turning after something external (a stream, a community post, a game update) breaks the initial invisibility.
That is the real story of the Steam Workshop in 2026: not that a few mods win, but that almost everything is never even in the race.