Steam helped the Chinese bypass censorship and watch porn

In the top Steam you can notice an anomaly: along with Counter-Strike or Dota, there is the Wallpaper Engine application. It allows

download animated and interactive wallpapers forcomputer. That's great, sure, but it's hard to explain why an obscure app ranks alongside blockbuster franchises. As it turned out, it was the Chinese. Discuss

Over 200,000 Wallpaper Engine reviewsare written in Chinese and cover the period from 2016 to 2022. And almost all of these reviews mention porn. The application is used as a cloud storage and video player for sharing erotic content.

The fact is that online porn is banned in China,so people have to be creative to get access to it. Steam is one of the few popular platforms that are available in the country. The MIT Technology Review estimates that Chinese users now make up at least 40% of Wallpaper Engine's audience.

Among over 1.6 million wallpapers in the appabout 7.5% of them are labeled "for adults". Often these are nude anime characters in provocative poses, and sometimes pornographic photos and videos of real people.