I had no idea this was a thing until one day I was swapping games or something and temporarily held it between my lips. I didn't taste it right away so I didn't immediately link it back to the cartridge, but I mentioned it to the SO and she enlightened me.
As a Steam Deck owner, I find the whole exhaust air thing hilarious because it smells like nothing but warm air to me. But others seem to have drastically different descriptions of it.
I don’t like the idea of a company telling me what I can and cannot smell. My father smelled potentially hazardous fumes, and his father ‘fore him! We will not submit!
i dont understand why but the smell of fresh electronics and cars is soo good. I read somewhere that its the glue off gassing and could cause a mild high and at high enough concentrations or time lenght brain damage. yay
I have an old early 2000s mp3 player that still to this day has an inexplicable sweet orange/citrus scent that emanates from the audio jacks, even when not in use.
For real though, it smells nice so it's probably pretty toxic. For some reason everything that smells or tastes good but isn't food ends up being toxic as fuck. Like lead and plutonium. I've heard lead is sweet (I was smart enough not to eat the wall candy growing up), and plutonium apparently tastes like sour candy. The deck is probably shitting out super fenta-cancaids fumes that're gonna shrivel our sex bits but it doesn't matter because it smells divine.
It's probably off gassing aromatics from the molded plastics parts. Anything aromatic (in an organic chem context) is possibly carcinogenic. Past that its semi-volatile phthalates and other possible additives and light volatiles that may be off gassing especially from the unit's heat generation/dissipation.
Offgassing testing is common (think new car smell...Yeah unfortunately that's carcinogenic too, but we're testing for stuff now). I'm pretty surprised they didn't either invest in the right types of plastics that wouldn't have potentially toxic emissions...unless they did and didn't care until someone noticed and spread the word.
no it's not toxic, they have regulation for that, even valve said the the fumes aren't toxic, put they aren't going to say that people can smell it because some dumbass gonna burn their nose lol