Chinese players exchange porn on Steam, disguising it as desktop wallpaper.

The Wallpaper Engine, which allows you to use the “live” desktop wallpaper, has a lot of user content and an incredibly high rating in Steam – almost the highest of all the software on this platform (almost half a million reviews, 98% of which are positive). However, it turns out that this popularity is not only based on the usual content.

For those who speak Chinese, everything becomes clear from the reviews of this application – more than 200 thousand user reviews of Wallpaper Engine in recent years were written in Chinese, and almost all of them are about using the utility as a cloud storage and video player for storing and sharing adult content.

The fact is that online porn is banned in China, so users have to turn to such non-trivial solutions. Steam is one of the few global platforms still operating there, and its social features and fast servers outside of China make it a very convenient tool for sharing porn. MIT Technology Review now estimates that the Chinese audience accounts for at least 40% of all Wallpaper Engine users.

This way of using the utility is hardly talked about in the West and few people know about it, but in China it has long been no secret – MIT Technology Review cites a Chinese player in Beijing who claims that Wallpaper Engine has been used this way en masse for at least the last two or three years.

Interestingly, the popularization of the utility in 2020 was indirectly helped by an article by a Chinese journalist in the local media, who shared his experience in using it and what he found among user-generated content – regular porn, hentai and even pirated copies of American movies.