When U.S. cable giant Comcast recently announced a deal with Netflix, in which the video-streaming service would receive a direct connection to the cable company in exchange for an undisclosed fee, it had the tech industry worried.

Netflix's performance had been suffering on Comcast's network while its performance on other internet service providers saw little degradation, a fact it made known publicly. Comcast denied it was stifling Netflix's traffic. While the cause of the poor performance was not revealed, the two companies reached an agreement where Netflix would pay Comcast a fee to directly interconnect with the cable company, vastly improving the quality of video streams for Comcast customers.

The deal is a boon for Comcast subscribers, who will now experience better-quality Netflix streams. But it has also raised concerns about the baseline robustness of the internet in North America, potentially uncompetitive behavior by monopoly cable companies and internet users being price-gouged with no alternative.

This particular deal may seem unrelated to the video game industry, but analysts and experts on net neutrality told Polygon that those who use online gaming services like Steam, Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network should be paying attention, because the precedents set in the cable world could potentially impact the gaming world, and it may not be for the better.