Why? Microsoft would be foolish to sell off its most valuable player. The Xbox 365, Xbox One, and Xbox Live generate billions of dollars every quarter for Microsoft. Aside from the 7.4 million physical units the company moved last quarter, Microsoft generates service revenue from about half of its 48 million subscribers. Subscription prices range from $5 to $10 monthly, depending on term length, but even on the low end of the scale Microsoft is probably pulling in more than $1 billion in service revenue each month from Xbox Live memberships alone. (It certainly softens the blow of the $900 million loss the company took on Surface 1.0.)

Still…all that content has to travel over digital pipes and be delivered at a high quality of experience.

Stepping into the arena

With all of this action it would seem like CSPs are being pushed out of the discussion, but that’s really not the case. It seems, instead, that CSPs haven’t been proactive enough to capture a piece of the gaming market.

According to the latest report from Ericsson Consumer Labs, “It is not bandwidth that is the most important aspect of the network quality for gaming, but rather the stability and reliability.” Further, Ericsson found that the primary pain point for gamers is disruption of the seamless experience.

Let that sink in. The network is essential to the entire gaming lifecycle.

Good plays

There are many ways for CSPs to monetize their assets and capabilities specific to gaming content. These include enabling:

• Premium service-packages
• Single-use performance boosting
• In-game communication
• Virtual asset economy
• Direct-to-carrier-billing
• Developer partnerships
• In-game advertising

There are at least two ways CSPs can differentiate themselves using premium service packages. First, gamers are willing to spend money on improved quality of service (QoS), particularly if they play massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) like World of Warcraft, presenting one attractive monetization strategy for mobile operators. These games, not to mention the virtual lives they enable users to create, are lost when service lags affect users during gameplay; the desire to eliminate latency and improve the game experience is a compelling reason for a user to opt for a higher level of service and speed from his or her wireless carrier. Policy can also be effectively exerted to create numerous personalized, premium packages that deliver a consistently top-tier gaming experience when it matters most to a user.