Why the German “Wallpaper Engine” for €4 is one of the 10 biggest games on Steam

With almost 77,000 concurrent users, the “Wallpaper Engine” by 2 German developers is one of the 10 games on Steam with the most concurrent players. This has surprised some for years: now a new report explains what is behind this anomaly.

This has always been a mystery on Steam:

• Long standing among the world’s most popular games on Steam is an outlier: “the Wallpaper Engine.” It’s the only “non-game” to sit this high on Steam’s charts.
• Even today, the “Wallpaper Engine” is the 10th place in the list of games with the most simultaneous players, between the MMOs Ark: Survival Evolved and Rust.
• In a new report, the riddle of the mysterious “wallpaper engine” is now solved.

What was so confusing about the Wallpaper Engine? That such a program ranks 10th among concurrent users has always been a mystery. Because otherwise only games are so high on Steam.

The Wahlpaper engine is actually there to create dynamic desktop backgrounds for Windows and costs €4. In 2017, for example, the engine was used for hero portraits in Overwatch.

The program was developed in October 2016 by two Germans who act as “Wallpaper Engine Team”.

Porn Is Banned In China – But Steam Is Allowed…

Why is the engine so popular? Like a report in MIT Technology Review explained, the program is heavily used by Chinese, who use it as a kind of “cloud drive” to share files that are otherwise strictly forbidden in China. Especially porn:

“More than 200,000 Steam reviews are written in Chinese, from 2016 to 2022. These reviews are almost all about one thing: porn. Or more specifically, using the software as a cloud drive and video player to share adult content.”

According to the magazine, online pornography is heavily censored and criminalized in China. Steam is one of the only global platforms available in China at all. So the Chinese have been looking for a creative way to distribute content via international high-speed servers.

Of the 1.6 million wallpaper submissions, 7.5% were marked as “for adults”. Often there are anime characters in sexually explicit posts.

The German program became popular in China around 2020 thanks to an article by the journalist Cui Jaianyi: he discovered porn, hentai anime, Donald Trump memes and pirated copies of Hollywood films such as “Joker” on the Wallpaper Engine.

Such games usually come from Germany on Steam:

How are the developers reacting to this? The report quotes Kristjan Skutta, who was invited to an event in China in 2019 and asked about how his program is being used. It is said that he responded to the question with a laugh and said:

“What is wrong with that? The Wallpaper Engine is just a framework. It doesn’t matter what you upload with it – even crazy videos. I don’t think it’s a problem.”

But the Chinese government might see things differently. Many Chinese people the magazine spoke to said they feared China could close the loophole on Steam.

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