![]() The user proceeded to log over 5,000 hours in Wallpaper Engine. “What’s the sickest is that someone straight up uploaded porn to the Workshop,” reads one March 2019 review in Chinese, upvoted by 456 others. The top 70 most upvoted reviews of all time on Steam for this software are all written in simplified Chinese. They are also some of the most devoted users of Wallpaper Engine. Compare this with 40%, and it’s clear that Chinese users are overrepresented in Wallpaper Engine’s user base. A different stat by Steam suggests that 21% of overall traffic came from China in the seven days before the publication of this story. Meanwhile, only 24.75% of total Steam users set their default language as simplified Chinese, according to Steam’s latest sampling survey, from June 2022. (Language is a common proxy for Steam users’ geographical distribution, which is hard to collect on Steam.) More recent reviews follow the same trend: during the first seven days of July, the software received 2,907 Steam reviews, and MIT Technology Review has found that 40% of those were written either in simplified Chinese or by someone with a simplified Chinese username. It’s impossible to know exactly how many of Wallpaper Engine’s users are from China, but evidence suggests that at least 40% of them are Chinese, almost twice Steam’s Chinese user percentage.Īmong the nearly half a million Steam reviews of Wallpaper Engine, 40% were written by someone whose default language was simplified Chinese, compared with English at 28%. His article in the Chinese media helped bring the software’s hidden uses to the attention of those who were not yet in on the secret. ![]() There he found porn, hentai anime, Donald Trump memes, and even pirated copies of Hollywood movies, like Joker. Having been a gamer and a Steam user, he downloaded Wallpaper Engine and tested it. Did people like to change their wallpapers so often?”Ĭui Jianyi, a Chinese writer and journalist, wrote about the phenomenon in 2020 after he saw someone mention it on social media. Visa had continued working with MindGeek’s paywalled sites, such as Brazzers, and its advertising network.“It was at least two or three years ago when this went viral,” says Zhou, a Chinese gamer in Beijing who asked to use only his last name due to privacy concerns. MindGeek was brought to the brink of collapse in late 2020 after its main site Pornhub was cut off by Mastercard and Visa following an investigation that identified unlawful content on the platform. Visa said it disagreed “strongly” with the court’s decision to dismiss its argument that alleged injuries suffered by the plaintiff - a woman who said sexual footage of her taken when she was underage was uploaded to Pornhub - depended “entirely on the independent actions of parties other than Visa”.įurther rulings on the case could have long-standing implications for payment networks and their liability over transactions carried out using credit cards. “At this early stage in the case, courts must accept as true all allegations made in a lawsuit - even if they are not accurate or proven,” he added. “In this pretrial decision, the court denied Visa’s motion to be removed from the case on a theory that Visa was complicit in MindGeek’s actions because Visa payment cards were used to pay for advertising on MindGeek sites, among other claims,” Visa chief executive Alfred Kelly said in a statement.
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