Those of you who reload the Valve job postings page every morning hoping to find a way out of your meaningless, dead-end career may have noticed that the esteemed game developer is now looking for a couple of hardware engineers to "conceive, design, evaluate, and produce new types of input, output, and platform hardware."

The job postings don't go into any specifics on what kind of hardware Valve is looking for help with exactly, but the company says it wants to "invent whole new gaming experiences" that can "enhance" the kinds of software it's already making. Some might immediately try to connect the job postings to recent rumors of a PC-based "Steam Box" game console designed to run Valve's digital distribution service. But it's just as likely that the company is looking for people to further develop the kind of biofeedback devices it talked about at last year's Game Developers Conference, or even work on its patent for a "pivotally translatable handle" controller that came to light last year. Or maybe it's something the company hasn't spoken about publicly at all.

In any case, it seems clearer than ever that Valve has its sights set on expanding out of the software business, even as it says it's "a long way from... shipping any sort of hardware."