Valve asks Steam Deck owners to 'please refrain' from huffing its exhaust fumes, PC gamers immediately respond: 'No'

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The nose knows what it wants.

Mickey smelling the Steam Deck
(Image credit: Disney, Valve)

When Valve introduced the Steam Deck, the company was adamant that its handheld gaming device was, at its core, a PC, with all the customizability and user freedom that entailed. "You shouldn't do any of this," Valve said in a teardown video, before proceeding to show everyone how to take apart the Steam Deck. So when Valve now tells Steam Deck owners they shouldn't be sticking their noses next to the handheld's exhaust vents and taking a big, deep breath, I have to wonder if, y'know, they really mean it.

Okay, they probably do really mean it—but that's not stopping people from huffing anyway.

In a now-viral Reddit post from Tuesday, a Steam user messaged Valve support to ask if it's "safe to inhale the exhaust fumes from the top vent of the Steam Deck." Valve's customer support got back with a polite, amusingly dry response: 

"As with all electronics, it is generally not recommended you inhale the exhaust fumes on your device. While there are no safety concerns with general usage, directly inhaling the device's vent fumes should be avoided. We understand that it may be a meme, but please refrain from this behavior for the safety of your health."

Valve's response got picked up by IGN and Kotaku, but the plea to not breathe deeply of the Deck's warm, plastic-tinged exhaust has seemingly fallen on deaf ears. The most common answer from Steam Deck owners seems to be a resounding "no."

Here's No Man's Sky developer Sean Murray:

And so on:  

I'd like to suggest that those who stand steadfast by their Deck sniffing rally around the words of Redditor juggernot10, who responded to the original thread with this stirring poem: 

Comment from r/SteamDeck
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Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).