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Gamevil's mobile game with micro-transactions

Super Boom Boom 2 is certainly innovative

Gamevil's mobile game with micro-transactions
Gamevil has announced plans to release Super Boom Boom 2: Space Adventure later this month in the US, complete with its own micro-transactions platform.

The game itself is an action title with five levels, unlockable extras and online high-score tables.

However, it's the micro-transaction element that's most interesting. Players will be able to buy 'G-Points' using real money, then exchange those points for new levels, items and mini-games.

The publisher says the feature will work on 98 per cent of available handsets, including BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.

In the west, we haven't seen much of this kind of thing in mobile games, but in Gamevil's native South Korea, it's more established (particularly so for non-mobile MMOs, but also for mobile games too).

For example, Gamevil estimates that players of its Baseball Superstars 2008 game bought an average of $1.50 of G-Points each, and that more generally, micro-transactions have boosted individual games' revenue by 30-40 per cent - and in one case, a whopping 300 per cent.

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Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)