Online pornography is banned in China, so people there have to be creative to access it. Steam is one of the only popular global platforms still available in the country, and its community features, high-speed international servers, and increasingly free approach to sexual content have made it an inevitable choice. Chinese users now account for at least 40% of Wallpaper Engine’s global user base, estimates MIT Technology Review.
Last year, users in China suddenly needed to use VPN services to access certain Steam services. As the reviews show, they now fear that they may soon lose this rare community, either because of the moderation of the platform’s content or the possibility that China may block Steam altogether.
An open secret
Wallpaper Engine, developed by a German-based duo and first released on Steam in October 2016, allows users to change their static wallpapers to something more dynamic. Most of the wallpapers submitted by users to the software workshop are innocuous: anime characters, cyberpunk cities, landscape drawings, and movie posters. But it’s also not hard to find NSFW content in between: about 7.5% of the more than 1.6 million contributions are labeled “mature”. These are often nude anime characters in suggestive sexual positions and positions, and sometimes pornographic photos and videos of real people.
Despite the success of Wallpaper Engine as probably the most “played” non-game software on Steam, its erotic side has rarely been reported in English, except for a brief article in the middle of Kotaku games and sporadic discussions on social media. However, within Chinese online communities, it has been an open secret among gamers and game publishers since it was released.
“It was at least two or three years ago when this went viral,” says Zhou, a Chinese player from Beijing who asked that he only use his last name for privacy issues. “I was confused why I always was [on the top 10 played games ranking]. Did people like to change wallpapers so often? ”
Cui Jianyi, a Chinese writer and journalist, wrote about the phenomenon in 2020 after seeing someone mention it on social media. After being a Steam player and user, he downloaded Wallpaper Engine and tested it. There he found porn, hentai anime, Donald Trump memes and even pirated copies of Hollywood movies, like Joker. His article in the Chinese media helped bring to light those who did not yet know the secret hidden uses of the software.
It is impossible to know exactly how many Wallpaper Engine users are from China, but evidence suggests that at least 40% of them are Chinese, almost double the percentage of Chinese Steam users.
Among Wallpaper Engine’s nearly half a million Steam reviews, 40% were written by someone whose default language was Simplified Chinese, compared to 28% English. The most recent revisions follow the same trend: during the first seven days of July, the software received 2,907 revisions from Steam and MIT Technology Review has found that 40% of them were written in Simplified Chinese or by someone with a Simplified Chinese username. (The language is a common proxy for the geographic distribution of Steam users, which is difficult to pick up on Steam.)