Valve hiring hardware heads

In a move that makes the long rumoured Steam Box look a lot more likely, Valve has started advertising for industrial designers .

The ad - spotted by The Verge yesterday - could just be about finding someone to join an existing team and model prototypes for gravity gun-shaped controllers, but the wording suggests that there are much bigger plans afoot than that.

This is, of course just the latest in a long list of signs that Valve's going to break free of mere desktop clients before long. It follows on from the formation of a Linux team and an interest in wearable computing and well documented concerns about Windows 8 from the very top of the company. It's also not the first time that Valve has expanded its hardware team this year .

So.... software companies that do hardware. Are they a good or a bad thing? In other words, are you expecting this:

Or this:

(Main pic by GizmoFBI )