PayPal has dabbled in using the mobile platform as a payment portal, which, despite being a very effective system, has never really caught on.

Now Orange has partnered with Barclaycard to develop a similar system. The co-branded technology is intended to allow people to pay for products and services by waving their handset against a reader - a move the companies suggest could be 'the biggest revolution in payments since plastic cards were introduced over 40 years ago'.

Initially it's aimed at retail, though a direct and confidently secure channel from a mobile handset to a bank account could easily benefit the games industry - especially as rumours of more and more provider and handset specific online app stores surface.

Assuming game and application developers can harness this new Orange/Barclaycard system affordably and effectively, it could open up the mobile gaming market exponentially when players no longer submit payments through premium text messaging or distribution portals.

Fishlabs is one of the first developers attempting to bypass the costly publisher/distributor avenues of mobile gaming, so a system like this could be very appealing to the small software studio.