The application Wallpaper Engine, which allows you to use “live” desktop wallpapers, has tons of custom content and an incredibly high rating on Steam — perhaps the highest of any software on the platform (nearly half a million reviews, 98% of which are positive). However, it turns out that such popularity is based not only on “ordinary” content.

For those who speak Chinese, everything becomes clear from the reviews of this application – more than 200,000 user reviews of Wallpaper Engine in recent years have been written in Chinese, and almost all of them relate to the use of the utility as a cloud storage and video player for storing and sharing adult content.

The fact is that online porn is prohibited in China, so users have to resort to such non-trivial solutions. Steam is one of the few global platforms still around, and its social features and fast servers outside of China make it a very convenient tool for sharing porn. Currently, MIT Technology Review estimates that the Chinese audience accounts for no less than 40% of all Wallpaper Engine users.

This way of using the utility is hardly talked about in the West and few people know, but in China, it has not been a secret for a long time. MIT Technology Review refers to the words of a Chinese player from Beijing, who claims that Wallpaper Engine is massively used in this way for no less than two or the last three years.

It is interesting that an article by a Chinese journalist in the local mass media indirectly helped to “popularize” the utility in 2020. He shared his experience in using it and what he found among user content – ordinary porn, hentai and even pirated copies of American films.