Telecom companies need to break out of the mindset of just being the pipes that carry gaming content and become intermediaries for players of those games, according to Billing World and OSS Today Magazine.

The market for massively multiplayer online games is used to paying a premium for the immersive universes in which those games take place, but telecom carriers, while serving as the delivery conduit for those universes, haven't been able to monetize it.

That could change with a shifting in consumer expectations that would come about by the telcos' becoming online storefronts for those games. New models could emerge that allow players to rent games for a short period of time as opposed to paying large purchase prices or fees for passes to the game's world.

Best of all for the telecom companies such as Verizon and AT&T is that such storefronts would require little new capital expenditures. The infrastructure for gaming commerce is already largely in place. By offering the player something new, such as different in-world experiences, telcos could tap into revenue that has to date gone to the game developers and services currently hosting those games.