Speaking at LinuxCon in New Orleans, Gabe Newell, the co-founder and managing director of Valve, dropped a hint of new upcoming Steam Hardware. Besides in a surprising statement, he called Linux the future of gaming despite its very small share of the market, mainly because its openness stood in stark contrast to the closed and proprietary worlds of consoles, mobiles, and tablets.

Currently, Linux gaming accounts for less than 1% of the market share from all angles, including players, player minutes, and revenue. Newell even acknowledged this fact.

“It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming. It’s sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope,” Newell said at LinuxCon.

Apparently, Valve has decided to do its best to make Linux the future of gaming by extending its Steam distribution platform to hardware designed for living rooms. Earlier, the company promised to present a Linux-based “Steam box” to compete against living room gaming consoles sometime this year, and also reported that Steam software will work better on TVs. At the ongoing conference, Newell hinted at an announcement next week.

“The next step in our contribution to this is to release some work we’ve done on the hardware side. Next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room.”

“Bringing Steam to Linux was a signal for our development partners that we really were serious about this Linux thing we were talking about. Besides just releasing Steam on Linux-based operating systems, Valve is contributing to the LLDB debugger project and is co-developing an additional debugger for Linux,” Newell said.

In another development, Valve recently announced the opening of the new Family Sharing Steam service, which will allow players to share their games on the popular digital platform with friends and family. Family Sharing is the name of the new service that allows Steam users to share a game with members of their own family, using multiple accounts. The idea was initially proposed by Microsoft with Xbox One, before being discarded in favor of more permissive policies on permanent connection and DRM.