Valve Looking for Hardware Testers

October 11, 2012 | by Joseph | News

Are you a gamer? Do you live in the Seattle area? Do you enjoy Valve products? If you answered yes to all of these, congratulations–a hell of an opportunity is waiting for you!

First, some background.

Many of you may or may not be aware that Valve has currently set its sights on producing gaming hardware. The idea goes all the way back to February of this year, where Gabe Newell said in a interview with Penny Arcade when asked about the lack of innovation in game consoles “Well, if we have to sell hardware we will. We have no reason to believe we’re any good at it, it’s more we think that we need to continue to have innovation and if the only way to get these kinds of projects started is by us going and developing and selling the hardware directly then that’s what we’ll do.”

Jump forward to April, where Valve employee Michael Abrash admitted they were, indeed, working on gaming hardware–particularly, gaming glasses. At the time they were only planning and drawing schematics, but it seems whatever they were drawing, they built. Jump forward again to September, where Valve officially unveils its first pair of Augmented Reality goggles. Prototypes, sure, but still pretty cool. And as it turned out, that wasn’t the only hardware Valve was working on: EARLIER in September, Valve showed the world it was working on “Big Picture Mode”, that would allow players to stream the games in their Steam Library onto their HDTV’s.

Today, Valve is looking for dedicated gamers to test some of the hardware they’re working on: all you have to do is fill out this survey (it’ll take an hour, give or take), and if you live in Seattle and you’re selected, you’ll get the opportunity to see and play with some of Valve’s new toys. If you live elsewhere in the US, Valve still invites you to fill out a form, because they may hold more tests in other locations around the country. There’s no word as to WHAT you’ll be testing–be it the Augmented Reality Goggles, Big Picture Mode, or something else entirely, but there’s only one way to find out for sure!

While the opportunity to try out this hardware is interesting, more interesting (and news-worthy) is the idea that Valve is taking the development of hardware in a more serious direction, rather than just treating it as a passing fancy. Could we get a new valve-backed console in the coming years? Will Valve throw it’s hat in the ring with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo?

As both a journalist and a gamer, I certainly hope so.

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