Total subscriptions tell you how big a Workshop is. They don't tell you how the demand is distributed. In some game ecosystems, a handful of mods capture the majority of every subscription a player ever makes. In others, demand is spread across hundreds of thousands of items so thinly that even the most-installed mod barely moves the total.
That distribution — call it demand concentration — is one of the most underappreciated signals in Workshop analytics, because it changes what "the Workshop" means for a studio. Using ModSignal's live dataset across 396 tracked games, here's how much of each ecosystem's subscription volume sits in its top 1, top 10, and top 100 mods.
The concentration ranking: top-mod share of total subscriptions
These figures show the percentage of each game's total tracked subscriptions captured by its most-installed mods. A higher number means demand is concentrated at the top; a lower number means a long tail of many mods each contribute a little.
| Game | Active mods | Total subs | Top-1 share | Top-10 share | Top-100 share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Counter-Strike 2 | 144,369 | 424M | 9.4% | 32.7% | 69.9% |
| Dota 2 | 52,523 | 220M | 4.6% | 28.1% | 75.8% |
| Don't Starve Together | 25,358 | 293M | 3.5% | 20.8% | 52.6% |
| Project Zomboid | 59,551 | 695M | 0.7% | 5.2% | 26.9% |
| RimWorld | 59,331 | 351M | 0.9% | 5.0% | 21.6% |
| Cities: Skylines | 158,327 | 784M | 0.5% | 3.1% | 10.0% |
| Garry's Mod | 174,413 | 1,566M | 0.4% | 2.3% | 10.2% |
| People Playground | 138,207 | 161M | 0.7% | 3.8% | 17.3% |
Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2: a few mods carry the ecosystem
At one extreme sits Counter-Strike 2. The single most-subscribed item — crashz' Crosshair Generator v3 — holds 9.4% of every subscription in the whole game, and the top 10 mods account for nearly a third. These are not content mods in the traditional sense; they are training and utility tools that a large fraction of competitive players install as a matter of routine. Aim Botz (24.4M subs), the CS2 Config Generator (12.8M), and crashz' Viewmodel Generator (12.2M) are effectively part of the default competitive setup. Because the game is the same for everyone, the same handful of tools serves everyone.
Dota 2 follows the same pattern, driven by a single phenomenon: DOTA AUTO CHESS at 10.2M subs and Overthrow at 10.1M. These are not QoL tools but full custom game modes that became cultural moments, absorbing a disproportionate share of the ecosystem's installs. When a single mod becomes the de facto way people play a different game inside a game, it flattens the long tail.
Don't Starve Together: quality-of-life concentration
Don't Starve Together (25k active mods, 293M subs) sits in the middle: its top 10 mods hold 20.8% of demand, and Combined Status (10.3M), Global Positions (8.5M), and Minimap HUD (8.3M) lead. These are near-mandatory quality-of-life tools — a minimap and a status readout — that almost every multiplayer session installs. A niche community with a few non-negotiable addons produces strong concentration without being a massive game.
The long tail: Garry's Mod, Cities: Skylines, RimWorld, Project Zomboid
The other extreme is where Workshop is a true long tail. Garry's Mod is the largest in absolute terms — 1.57 billion subscriptions across 174k active mods — yet its top 100 mods hold only 10.2% of that demand, and the single biggest (PropHunt, 6.2M) is under half a percent. The same is true of Cities: Skylines, where top-10 share is just 3.1% and the most-subscribed mod (Harmony, a dependency) is 4.2M of 784M.
Project Zomboid and RimWorld are the interesting middle-ground of the long tail: they have modest concentration in the top 1 (under 1%), but their top-100 still reaches 26.9% and 21.6% respectively. These are games where thousands of mods each serve a small niche (a specific building, a specific trait, a specific tool) and collectively carry the ecosystem — the community is deep, but no single item defines it. This is the "build your own" profile: demand is spread because the game encourages many small personalizations rather than one ubiquitous addon.
Why concentration matters more than total volume
Total subscription count tells you a Workshop is active. Concentration tells you what kind of activity it is — and that changes product strategy:
- High concentration (CS2, Dota 2) — the ecosystem runs on a small set of ubiquitous tools. New creators compete against entrenched utility items; the opportunity is in serving the next standard utility, not displacing the current one.
- Deep long tail (Garry's Mod, Cities: Skylines) — a single creator can carve a durable niche without ever touching the top 100. The ecosystem rewards breadth and many small, personal mods over one giant one.
- QoL-spike (Don't Starve Together) — a few non-negotiable addons anchor the tail. New tools that slot into the existing QoL layer can ride that distribution.
- Niche-deep (Zomboid, RimWorld) — moderate concentration with a meaningful top-100. The best mix for creators: a large addressable tail with enough gravity in the top to matter.
For a studio deciding where to invest in Workshop support, concentration reveals whether the ecosystem is a library of essentials or a marketplace of niches — and therefore what players will actually install.
How we measure
All figures come from the ModSignal live dataset, which continuously tracks Workshop items and subscription counts via the Steam Web API. Total subscriptions per game are the sum of current subscription counts across all active, subscribed items; "share" is that count divided by the game's total. The ranking reflects a snapshot as of August 2026 and refreshes as the Workshop graph updates.
Explore the full dataset to see these distributions in real time, or compare the extreme cases — Counter-Strike 2 vs Garry's Mod — directly.