Most-grabbed Steam games this month (and why people use SteamTools on them)

Every month we look at which Steam App IDs our generator has been called on most. June 2026 is interesting because the top of the list is not what we expected — three of the top five are not new games, they are old ones with active modding scenes. Here is what we learned, and what it means for how we tune the site.

The top 5 App IDs (anonymized)

1. 400 — Portal. The original Source engine puzzle game from 2007. Still in active rotation because of the community mapping scene and a recent wave of high-profile speedrun tournaments.
2. 4000 — Garry's Mod. The 2004 Source mod kit. People pull a fresh manifest for it surprisingly often — mostly because the gmod install is brittle and the SteamTools workflow is more reliable than fighting with the Steam client's depot cache.
3. 1623730 — Palworld. The 2024 survival game that is still pulling in concurrent players. The manifests break frequently because the dev team ships patches weekly; people re-grab to keep their SteamTools copies in sync.
4. 730 — Counter-Strike 2. The CS:GO replacement. People generate manifests for the beta and experimental branches to keep up with the CS2 trust factor changes before they hit the public branch.
5. 892970 — Valheim. The 2021 Viking survival game. People generate manifests for the dedicated server branch, not the client branch — SteamTools on a headless server is the canonical way to run a Valheim server on Linux.

What we changed because of this

Two changes shipped this week, both informed by the top-5 list:

• Branch field is now visible by default in the generator. Most lookups default to public, but power users — the people behind four of the top five — almost always want a non-default branch. Hiding the field in a tooltip was costing people time.
• Recent strip shows the branch you last used per App ID. When you click a recent game, the generator restores the App ID and the branch you picked, so going from "Portal beta" back to "Portal public" no longer takes two clicks.

What we are working on next

Three things on the roadmap that came directly from this list:

• Dedicated server manifests as a first-class concept. The Valheim case above is the most common one, but the same pattern shows up for Ark, Project Zomboid, and a dozen other long-running dedicated-server games.
• Per-branch changelog at the top of the result card. If your generated manifest is for a branch that was just updated, you will see "this build was refreshed 12 hours ago" before you commit to the download.
• Common troubleshooting for each top App ID. The CS2 case has a known issue with the experimental branch that drops a couple of depots; the Palworld case has a known issue with the Pals DLC. Surfacing that inline is more useful than making people re-read the FAQ.

If your favorite game is not in the top 5

That is the more interesting list, honestly. The next 50 App IDs are scattered across single-player RPGs, indie roguelikes, asset packs for Source, and one notable entry from a 1998 game that still gets traffic. The long tail is what keeps this site worth running — there is no "top 5" that is even close to representative.

If you have a game that breaks a lot, or that you find yourself regenerating weekly, tell us in the Discord. We can usually either add a per-app note to the result card or write it up as a dedicated blog post.