China's Porn Ban Has Been Defeated By Horny Steam Users With Wallpaper App

Steam is full of some wonderful stuff. This last week, the highly anticipated indie darling Stray became 2022’s best user-rated game on the platform, knocking the PC port of God of War (2018) from the top spot.

Despite being branded as a digital game service though, Steam isn’t just for games. In fact, at the time of writing, today’s seventh most-played “game” is none other than Wallpaper Engine, which is an app for, you guessed it, sharing and downloading desktop wallpapers. As reported by Kotaku, though, its popularity may be the result of a very NSFW reason.

It’s porn. People are using it to look at porn. Namely, many Chinese users are using the app for this reason, as porn has been illegal in China since 1997, and Steam has essentially (unintentionally) provided a workaround, since it’s one of the few platforms in the country which can be easily accessed without using a VPN.

MIT Technology Review writes that of the 1.6 million contributions to Wallpaper Engine, 7.5% have been labelled as “mature”. As for the wallpapers in question, they vary from nude anime characters, to pornographic photos and videos of real people. Kotaku report that the most popular ones feature Overwatch, Final Fantasy and Genshin Impact characters. 

Wallpaper Engine’s less safe for work facilities aren’t exactly a secret, as many, many of its reviews reveal. Steam user Uncle Cony’s positive review (with 129.8 hours on record, and 68 at the time of their review) simply reads: “Big booby anime girl on my computer.” Meanwhile, with a whopping 1015.5 hours on record (53.8 at the time of their review), tibbles wrote: “You know you've hit a new low when you have [masturbated] to your wallpapers.” 

Earlier this year, a real senate meeting was derailed by a porn video of Final Fantasy VII’s Tifa, which was as chaotic as you’d imagine. And yes, the whole thing was recorded. Do with that information what you will.