Valve job posting confirms hardware development

Rumors of a so called Steam Box have been flying high for a while now. Valve's Gabe Newell has talked about working on hardware prototypes, but that doesn't mean an actual Steam Box will ever see the light of day. Valve has, however, confirmed via job posting that it's currently developing hardware to "enhance game experiences."

According to the post for an electronics engineer on Valve's jobs page: "For years, Valve has been all about writing software that provides great gameplay experiences. Now we're developing hardware to enhance those experiences, and you can be a key part of making that happen. Join our 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."

One theory is that Valve could be working on a controller with Biometric feedback rather than an actual Steam Box, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

Newell told Penny-Arcade recently, "We're trying to get our-the experiments we've been doing in-you know we did a ton of work on biofeedback, on biometrics, and that'll, you know, from our point of view we were like 'okay, this is all sort of proven out' and we're just sort of scratching our heads trying to figure out the best way to get that hardware out to customers without something where we'd just say 'okay, this works.' it's not a question of whether or not this is going to be useful for customers, whether or not it's going to be useful for content developers, you know, it's figuring out the best way we can get these into people's hands."

GamesIndustry International has contacted Valve for comment but has not received a response.