Oops - someone nearly caused a fire with the Steam Controller Puck

As a bit of a PSA - you might want to ensure you're rather careful with Valve's new Steam Controller charging Puck. Keep anything conductive away from it.

There's a pretty big Reddit post that's appeared from user Toikka, who notes they accidentally left a metallic smartwatch strap laying around that went on top of the Steam Controller charging Puck and started "sizzling" that "Almost started a fire". Which…does not sound like something that's particularly safe. However, to be clear here, part of the issue is that this particular strap was attached to a watch that was actually on charge. So there was some cross-over happening here.

Picture the Redditor showed below:

I'm sure to some that this might seem like a "well, duh" moment. Don't leave things laying around chargers. Especially if they're also on charge. But, we're human, and humans can be pretty stupid or just generally clumsy. We also have children, pets and — you get the idea, accidents can definitely happen so this seems like something worth being clear about regardless.

As for overall safety - Valve are likely not the only hardware vendor to have this issue, as there's quite a few controllers out there that have a similar sort of charging pin system (like the 8BitDo Ultimate series).

Luckily, I still had the Steam Controller box and manual left here. So I dug into the manual, and Valve do actually have a small and pretty clear safety notice on this:

But, who actually reads this kind of small-print? My bet is only a very tiny minority of people, especially for something usually as simple as a game controller. Ideally, Valve should look to add a much more prominent warning (like in the Steam client) - just to be a bit more on the safe side.

I've emailed Valve to provide a comment on the safety of it and will update if they reply.