They’ll join a team that’s assigned ”hardware design, prototyping, testing” at Valve, where the applicant will ”conceive, design, evaluate, and produce” various physical gizmos.
It’s thought that Valve is looking to establish themselves within the peripheral market, as patents filed already show they’ve been thinking up some interesting new designs.
However there’s also some suggestion that Valve might even go as far as their own platform, of sorts. There’s already talk of a ‘Steam Box’ that apparently is in the process of being designed in partnership with manufacturers.
”Join our highly motivated team that’s doing hardware design, prototyping, testing, and production across a wide range of platforms,” read the electronics engineer job ad from Valve. ”We’re not talking about me-too mice and gamepads here - help us invent whole new gaming experiences.”
”Work with the hardware team to conceive, design, evaluate, and produce new types of input, output, and platform hardware,” it continued, under the duties section. Further down under the recommended section it lists knowledge and experience of ”power supply management” and ”ARM / X86 system design”.
Valve is testing a new GUI for Steam to let users easily play Steam games on TV. ”We’re prepping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI and getting ready to ship that, so we’re building boxes to test that on,” said marketing chief Doug Lombardi, referring to the shot of a PC Valve’s Greg Coomer had built, which people assumed was a ‘platform prototype’.
”We’re also doing a bunch of different experiments with biometric feedback and stuff like that, which we’ve talked about a fair amount,” he continued. ”All of that is stuff that we’re working on, but it’s a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware.” Nothing physical will be arriving just yet, that’s for sure: ”Whether we’re talking about Valve making hardware or partnering with others, nothing like that is happening any time soon.”
