Valve Looking for Platform Hardware Engineer

Valve I guess was being serious when they said they wanted to create a home PC console system that is more open. A new job opening has been posted on their website looking for an Electronics Engineer who can:

"For years, Valve has been all about writing software that provides great gameplay experiences, Now we€™re developing hardware to enhance those experiences, and you can be a key part of making that happen. Join our highly motivated team that€™s doing hardware design, prototyping, testing, and production across a wide range of platforms. We€™re not talking about me-too mice and gamepads here €“ help us invent whole new gaming experiences."

Now Valve did warn us a while back that they were just looking into the possibility of creating a new home console but that it would be a long way off. However, I have a theory as to why Valve may be doing this, with EA creating Origin I think Valve may be seeing a future where Steam may become somewhat obsolete. Let me explain, with Origin EA is able to lock down their own titles not allowing them to be sold on Steam so EA gets all the profits and Steam gets none. What happens when other major developers start doing the same thing? Somewhere down the line Activision and Rockstar may think to themselves why should I loose money to Steam when I can create my own digital distribution service like EA did with Origin and keep all the profits myself. In other words, I think Valve may see a day in the not so distant future where Steam may not be obsolete but if all major publishers create their own digital distribution service it will cut into Valve's profits big time. How much money would they loose if this happened? That is my guess as to why Valve is looking into creating a home console, to offset loses from publishers going out and creating their own digital distribution services. Now I am not saying this is the only reason but you have to think, just loosing EA games alone probably took a huge chunk of money away from Valve. Also I am not saying Valve is in any trouble financially or anything, just that they are probably being proactive in wanting another way to make income in case other publishers do start their own digital distribution services.