A new report from the MIT Technology Review (opens in new tab) has shed some light on the baffling popularity of Wallpaper Engine, an app that allows you to create, browse, and share Windows desktop wallpapers. It turns out that it’s a clever way for Chinese Steam-users to circumvent their country’s ban on online pornography.
As I write this, Wallpaper Engine is the 10th most played game on Steam, sitting pretty at around 80,000 users. That’s more than Rust, Warframe, and FIFA 22.
Navigating to its store page, meanwhile, tells me that the app has a 98% ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ user review rating and nearly half a million reviews total. In the past I’ve reasoned that the app must host the most radical wallpapers in the world, but it turns out that all this time users have been using the software as a big, salacious cloud drive.
The report’s author spoke with Cui Jianyi, a Chinese journalist who looked into Wallpaper Engine in 2020, and discovered it wasn’t long until he found “hentai anime, Donald Trump memes, and even pirated copies of Hollywood movies”. In other words, it sounds like Wallpaper Engine had become an ad-hoc version of The Pirate Bay, providing users with easy and relatively safe access to a buffet of illicit material. And desktop wallpapers, I suppose.
The original report estimates (based on the language of Steam reviews) that as many as 40% of Wallpaper Engine’s users hail from China, where adult content is severely restricted. The Chinese government has shut down thousands of pornographic websites (opens in new tab) in the last few years alone, and penalises domestic streaming sites for risqué content (opens in new tab) fairly regularly. It’s an environment that necessitates a certain level of ingenuity among anyone wanting to access pornography, and it means that Steam’s ‘grey area’ status on the Chinese internet comes in very handy.
Where big chunks of the western internet—Facebook, Google, Instagram and so on—are blocked in China, Steam remains mostly accessible. Although Valve created a China-specific version of the service early last year (opens in new tab), the Chinese government hasn’t yet blocked the global Steam website we’re all familiar with. That makes it a kind of porous border between the Chinese internet and the rest of the world where users can chat, hang out, play games and, yes, trade smut.
It’s hard to see this remaining the case, though. MIT Technology Review notes that Niko Partners—which specialises in ‘games market intelligence’ in Asia and the Middle East—has upgraded the risk of a Steam ban in China to ‘high’. The Chinese government, meanwhile, isn’t likely to let up in their campaign to quash internet pornography, and it feels like a matter of time before someone in the Cyberspace Administration Agency (opens in new tab) asks why Wallpaper Engine is such a wildfire hit with Chinese users.
Perhaps players will soon have to don an anti-porn helmet (opens in new tab) before they can sign into Steam.
