Valve sacks hardware division

Steam-owner and Half-Life maker Valve has reportedly sacked its hardware development team, comprising of as many as 25 people.

According to reports by Gamasutra, the move comes as the company appears to be changing track in its hardware ambitions, with the firings isolated to its hardware and Andriod development teams.

The effected employees have been asked not to talk to outsiders about the reasons behind the lay-offs but appears to be a consequence of the company changing its plans and priorities.

Shortly beforehand, former Valve-staffer and electrical engineer Jeri Ellsworth tweeted: "Yup. Got Fired today. Time for new exciting projects."

Additionally, Develop reported that the company's director of business has also left the company, having worked at Valve since 2005.

Valve recently unveiled its sponsored micro-PC intended for the living room and built by Xi3, codenamed Piston, suggesting the company has moved to outsourcing its hardware ambitions.

However, this move does follow on from recent reports that the company was interested in intergrating biometric information into its games and a talk at the Games Developers Conference in which Valve discussed experiments with virtual reality.

At the recent DICE event, Valve stole headlines with the news that it could soon be working on a movie project with Star Trek director J.J. Abrams.

"We’re gonna try and figure out if we can make a Portal movie or a Half-Life movie together," commented company boss Gabe Newell.

You can see his full talk with J.J. Abrams here:

James Lee

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James Lee is a freelance writer and analyst with extensive experience in the technology, media and games sectors. For the past few years he has provided content for internationally published industry reports, SEO companies and a variety of news-focused websites. Prior to this, James was responsible for covering news and producing in-depth features for GamesIndustry.biz while occasionally contributing to its sister-site. Eurogamer.net. In addition to this he has contributed to other notable sites such as CVG.co.uk, Edge-Online and DigitalSpy.