Nexus Mods counted 76,184,726 registered members and 888,002 hosted mods on its own network statistics page in late July 2026. Overwolf paid in-game creators $300 million across 2025. This page collects verified game modding statistics for 2026: platform scale, mod counts, creator payouts, Baldur’s Gate 3 milestones, and what published research measures about mod support and game revenue.
Game Modding Statistics
How Big Is The Nexus Mods Community In 2026?
Nexus Mods publishes a live counter of its own network. The figures below were read on 28 July 2026 and describe registered accounts and stored files, not active users.
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Registered members | 76,184,726 |
| Mods hosted | 888,002 |
| Downloadable files | 4,221,486 |
| Members with files uploaded | 319,699 |
| File page views | 14,874,006,007 |
| Endorsements given | 290,730,655 |
| Forum posts | 47,344,715 |
Source: Nexus Mods network statistics, read 28 July 2026
Growth shows up against the site’s own earlier reporting. When Nexus Mods announced its 10 billionth file download in February 2024, it recorded over 47 million members and 2,683 games. Its games directory listed 4,900 titles in July 2026.
Creator payments on the platform total more than $17.7 million to date, per the figure Nexus Mods displays on its homepage. Skyrim and Fallout remain the anchor communities, though the catalogue now stretches to games with far smaller audiences than the long-running MMO player bases that seeded early PC modding.
Game Modding Statistics By Platform
Three companies handle most mod distribution. Each reports a different measurement, so the rows below are not directly comparable to one another.
| Platform | Figure | What it measures | Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overwolf | 113 million | Monthly active users across the network | Nov 2025 |
| Overwolf | 178,000 | Creators on the platform | Nov 2025 |
| Overwolf | 32 billion | Mod downloads during the year | 2025 |
| mod.io | 2 billion | Lifetime UGC downloads | Jul 2025 |
| mod.io | 281,000 | Creators who submitted content | 2024 |
| Nexus Mods | 76,184,726 | Registered member accounts | Jul 2026 |
Source: Overwolf company announcement (November 2025); mod.io newsletter (July 2025) and 2024 year in review; Nexus Mods network statistics (July 2026)
mod.io reported the sharpest acceleration. CEO Scott Reismanis wrote in July 2025 that the first billion downloads took about five years and the second took just under 18 months. Overwolf described its 2025 download total as a 33% increase on the previous year.
Which Games Have The Most Mods?
Minecraft is the largest single modding community anyone has published numbers for. Its CurseForge downloads outweigh the rest of Overwolf’s catalogue combined, helped by modpacks that pull dozens of dependency files per install. Most of that volume flows through the PC storefront covered in these Steam release and market share figures.
| Game | Mods on CurseForge | Lifetime downloads |
|---|---|---|
| Minecraft | 240,000 | 93 billion |
| The Sims | 100,000 | 2.8 billion |
| Ark: Survival Ascended | 5,100 | 1 billion |
Source: Overwolf data reported by Forbes, November 2025
Ark shows what a small catalogue does under an in-game browser: roughly 5,100 mods against a billion downloads. Overwolf also said Hasbro’s Power Rangers cosmetic packs for Ark, sold as Premium Mods, passed six million downloads. Full ownership and revenue context for the biggest of these titles sits in this Minecraft player and revenue breakdown.
Game Modding Statistics On Creator Earnings
Overwolf publishes an annual payout total covering mods, in-game apps and private game servers. Payouts have risen every year it has reported them.
| Year | Paid to in-game creators |
|---|---|
| 2023 | Over $201 million |
| 2024 | $240 million |
| 2025 | $300 million |
Source: Overwolf company announcements, 2024 to 2025
Lifetime payouts passed $800 million by November 2025. Overwolf states a target of $1 billion in annual creator payouts by 2030, and told GamesBeat that some creators earn tens of thousands of dollars per month. That is a company goal, not a published forecast.
Nexus Mods sits at a different scale. Its homepage records more than $17.7 million earned by creators over the life of its rewards programme, against Overwolf’s $300 million in a single year.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Modding Statistics
Larian Studios added official cross-platform mod support in September 2024 through mod.io, which makes it the cleanest recent record of what an in-game mod browser does to download volume.
| Date | Cumulative mod downloads | Mods uploaded | Reported by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2024 | Over 50 million | Over 2,000 (PC) | mod.io |
| Jul 2025 | More than 250 million | Not stated | mod.io |
| Dec 2025 | Over 350 million | 10,000 | Larian Studios |
Source: mod.io newsletters (October 2024, July 2025); Larian Studios Community Update #36 (December 2025)
mod.io said the launch tripled use of its servers, with more than three million downloads a day for Baldur’s Gate 3 alone. Larian’s Michael Douse told mod.io the studio saw a 20% increase in daily active users across all platforms after mod support shipped. Console availability was the new element here, and it remains rare across the wider PlayStation Network audience.
Do Mods Increase Game Revenue?
GameDiscoverCo and mod.io published a joint study in September 2025 covering around 1,200 Steam games that earned at least $1 million in their first month. Close to 20% of them shipped with an official UGC or mod solution.
The revenue gap widens with age. An earlier 2024 run of the same research, limited to Steam Workshop titles, found a 7% advantage in year one and 23% by year five. Carless attributes the higher 2025 figures to a wider set of UGC-enabled games and more titles reaching five-year maturity.
| Measure (Steam) | Advantage for games with UGC support | Period after release |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | +8% | 1 year |
| Revenue | +31% | 5 years |
| Concurrent players | +75% | 2 years |
| Concurrent players | +115% | 5 years |
| Per-DLC revenue | +105% | Total tracked |
Source: GameDiscoverCo and mod.io UGC Impact Study 2025, published September 2025; base of around 1,200 Steam games earning $1m+ in month one
Console and VR were measured for the first time in the 2025 edition, using separate and smaller samples.
| Platform | Measure | Advantage for games with UGC support |
|---|---|---|
| PlayStation | Players after one year | +16% |
| Xbox | Players after one year | +24% |
| Meta Quest | Median growth over the past year | +30% |
Source: GameDiscoverCo and mod.io UGC Impact Study 2025; console base of roughly 1,000 titles selling 100,000+ units in month one, VR base of Quest titles with 1,000+ ratings
Saber Interactive told mod.io that SnowRunner players who install mods proved 2.4 times more likely to buy official DLC. Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo flagged the correlation problem directly: games that allow UGC may belong to genres with naturally long tails, and the $1 million threshold excludes most indie releases. That long-tail effect also turns up in retro gaming audience data, where community-maintained content keeps decades-old titles in circulation.
Game Modding Statistics Outlook For 2026
Nexus Mods published a 2026 roadmap in January confirming it had cancelled its cross-platform Nexus Mods App and moved development back to Vortex, which over 1.4 million modders use each month.
The company committed to supporting Vortex on SteamOS, targeting Steam Deck and Steam Machine hardware. Other Linux distributions will not be officially supported, though Vortex is open source. No release date has been announced, so this remains a stated plan rather than a shipped feature.
mod.io opened its marketplace monetisation service for integration in November 2025 after more than three years of development. Paid mod distribution is the axis to watch across Steam’s storefront data and the console platforms through 2026.
FAQ
How many people are in the game modding community?
Nexus Mods lists 76,184,726 registered members as of July 2026. Overwolf reports 113 million monthly active users across its network. These count different things and cannot be added together.
Which game has the most mods?
Minecraft, with 240,000 mods and 93 billion lifetime downloads on CurseForge, according to Overwolf data reported in November 2025. The Sims follows with 100,000 mods and 2.8 billion downloads.
How much do mod creators earn?
Overwolf paid creators $300 million during 2025, taking lifetime payouts past $800 million. Nexus Mods reports more than $17.7 million paid to creators over the life of its rewards programme.
Does Reddit have official communities for modding platforms?
Overwolf lists r/Overwolf among its official channels alongside Discord and its blog. Nexus Mods links to Discord, its own forums, and social accounts, but no subreddit, on its site footer.
Where do Baldur’s Gate 3 mod totals on Reddit come from?
Larian Studios publishes them. Community Update #36 in December 2025 reported over 350 million mod downloads and 10,000 mods uploaded to mod.io since support launched in September 2024.
Sources
https://www.nexusmods.com/about/stats
https://blog.overwolf.com/developers-november-newsletter-300m-paid-to-in-game-creators/
https://newsletter.mod.io/p/modio-newsletter-supporting-developers
https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/analysis-ugc-still-powers-sales-and