Rumours circulated earlier this year that Valve, the chaps behind Steam, Half-Life and the donut industry’s rising profits would be releasing a sort of set-top gaming hardware, essentially a gaming console. Rumours Valve was only too happy to quash.
If a job listing by the company, looking for hardware engineers is anything to go by, then it looks as if there might be something to those rumours – because as anybody who’s played Game.Dev Story will tell you, hiring a hardware engineer means you can release a console.
Valve’s looking for people to join a "highly motivated team that’s doing hardware design, prototyping, testing, and production across a wide range of platforms. We’re not talking about me-too mice and gamepads here – help us invent whole new gaming experiences." According to the ad, the new engineer’s job would be to “Work with the hardware team to conceive, design, evaluate, and produce new types of input, output, and platform hardware.”
"For years Valve has been all about writing software that provides great gameplay experiences. Now we’re developing hardware to enhance those experiences."
With Valve’s recent controller patents its entirely possible that they’re just going to be making interesting new peripherals to make enrich gaming on PC, but the job’s requirements for “ARM / X86 system design,” “Power supply management” and “Thermal management” I’m lead to believe otherwise.
Launch a PC-based console, make Half-Life 3 exclusive – and Gabe Newell could be eating donuts all the way to the bank.
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