As president of publisher Gamevil USA, Kyu Lee knows a thing or two about micro-payments in mobile games - his company has been doing it in its native Korea for some time now.

So it's no surprise that he's enthusiastic about Apple's announcement last night that micro-billing will now be possible inside iPhone games.

"Micro-payments is still a new business model that people are not aware of in a lot of territories around the world, and Apple’s introduction of this to the iPhone and iPod touch will help the whole gaming industry overall," he says.

However, he thinks it may also lead to a shift in the way publishers think about their games.

"The introduction of this will change the publisher’s perspective of games not as a single 'product' but as a 'platform' and 'service'," he says.

"Updates and overall play-time is going to be a much more important factor in the future for iPhone games, since a lot of these publishers will see the ARPU increasing across a handful of quality games, instead os seeing revenues coming from a large quantity of mediocre games."

Gamevil has released its Baseball Superstars game for iPhone, but without the micro-billing features seen in the Korean mobile version of the game. We assume this may change once iPhone 3.0 rolls out to consumers this summer.