Valve Software Recruiting Hardware Design Engineers

Valve, maker of Steam, has been up to something all year. Back in March, there were rumors that the company was building its own gaming console, but Valve more or less threw water on that. Then in April, there was a Valve job posting looking for electrical engineers who would help produce “new types of input, output, and platform hardware”, but at least one Valve developer said publicly that it was all about wearable computing, and that the work was all in R&D and not really in actual product development.

Now, Valve is looking for an industrial designer, according to a new job posting, and it sounds as though the company is getting increasingly fidgety about input devices and methods:

We’re frustrated by the lack of innovation in the computer hardware space though, so we’re jumping in. Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years. There’s a real void in the marketplace, and opportunities to create compelling user experiences are being overlooked.

Perhaps it’s a boondoggle to draw a direct line from March’s console rumor to now--you really never know what’s going on behind the scenes at any company--but we infer that Valve is weary of being held back by the hardware that’s available to them. Perhaps that’s unfair to hardware makers, but if Valve’s dissatisfaction leads to gaming input innovation, we won’t complain.