The Steam Workshop holds 6.79 million active mods. Someone builds every one of them. Using ModSignal's creator dataset, we can now answer a question nobody ranks directly: where in the world do the most-downloaded mod creators actually come from?
By joining 6.79 million active Workshop items to their creators' public Steam profiles (country flags are optional and public on Steam), we measured total subscriptions captured per country, plus a "productivity" figure — average subscriptions per listed creator. The picture is more concentrated than most people assume.
The US is the Workshop's single biggest contributor — by a lot
Among the ~250,000 creators who publicly list a country on their Steam profile, the United States leads by a wide margin:
| Country | Public creators | Mods | Total subscriptions | Subs per creator |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 53,203 | 313,386 | 1.05 billion | ~19,700 |
| Germany | 13,361 | 72,454 | 353 million | ~26,400 |
| United Kingdom | 13,991 | 78,060 | 326 million | ~23,300 |
| China | 3,116 | 35,773 | 293 million | ~94,000 |
| Russia | 7,758 | 57,917 | 264 million | ~34,000 |
| Canada | 9,019 | 50,087 | 197 million | ~21,900 |
| Australia | 6,018 | 37,231 | 150 million | ~24,800 |
| France | 6,924 | 35,598 | 142 million | ~20,500 |
| Poland | 3,521 | 21,194 | 139 million | ~39,600 |
| Sweden | 3,706 | 18,012 | 128 million | ~34,500 |
The US alone captures more subscriptions than Germany, the UK and China combined — 1.05B versus 353M + 326M + 293M = 972M. The sheer size of the American modding scene (53,000 public creators, 313,000 mods) compounds a simple arithmetic advantage: more creators, more games, more installs.
China's creators are the most productive at scale
The most striking reversal in the data is productivity per creator. China's ~3,100 publicly-located creators average ~94,000 subscriptions each — roughly 4.8 times the US figure (~19,700) and the highest of any large modding nation.
That's not a fluke of a single mega-creator. China's top games are a co-op and survival cluster that the rest of the world's modders under-serve:
| Chinese creators' top games | Subscriptions |
|---|---|
| Left 4 Dead 2 | 69.9 million |
| Don't Starve Together | 49.9 million |
| Cities: Skylines | 22.7 million |
| Counter-Strike 2 | 19.6 million |
| RimWorld | 16.0 million |
American creators spread wide across Garry's Mod (208M), Cities: Skylines (78M), Left 4 Dead 2 (68M), Project Zomboid (57M), Don't Starve Together (56M) and DayZ (46M). Chinese creators concentrate their output into dense co-op titles — and that focus translates directly into outsized per-creator reach.
Different countries, different specialisations
The game that dominates a country's output reveals what its modding scene is best at:
- USA — the generalist leader. Garry's Mod (208M subs) is the single biggest item but US creators have top-tier presences in more than a dozen games.
- Germany — the city-builder heartland. Cities: Skylines alone is 91M of Germany's 353M subs — the largest single-game contribution of any country outside the US.
- Sweden — tactical live-ops. Counter-Strike 2 contributes 37M of Sweden's 128M, alongside Cities: Skylines (21M).
- Denmark — a one-game dynasty. Garry's Mod makes up ~41% of Denmark's 102M subs, an extraordinary concentration.
- Russia — survival-first. Garry's Mod (73M), Project Zomboid (41M) and People Playground (15M) lead a roster weighted toward sandbox survival.
What this means for studios and scouts
- Scout where the demand is, not just the quantity. A small country with high subsidisation (China, Poland at ~39.6k, Sweden at ~34.5k) signals an undersupplied niche with proven appetite. If you're localising a game or a modding program, these are the communities where a handful of creators carry outsized weight.
- Language and co-op matter more than raw size. China's co-op concentration is a demand signal: titles like Left 4 Dead 2 and Don't Starve Together have a disproportionately large Chinese-modding tail. Studios porting into that market should expect — and support — deep local mod scenes.
- Productivity is a scouting filter. For a data-driven creator hunt, "subs per creator" by country is a better early signal than raw creator counts. A single German Cities: Skylines creator is worth more than dozens of diffuse low-traffic accounts.
How we measure
All figures come from the ModSignal live dataset of the Steam Workshop (6.79 million active items across 396 tracked games). We count mod creators who publicly list a country on their Steam profile — country flags are optional, so this analysis covers the ~250,000 of ~1.8 million total creators who opt in. "Subscriptions captured" sums the current subscriber count of each creator's active mods; "subs per creator" divides that by the number of public country-located creators, which slightly overstates small-county productivity (a couple of prolific creators dominate). It is a productivity estimate, not an exact per-person wage.
This is exactly the kind of demand-map ModSignal tracks daily to surface breakout creators and underserved market niches before they peak. Explore the live dataset to see these numbers move, or compare games directly.