Inside Social Games

Mobile payments are an increasingly popular way for people to pay for things like virtual goods, because it lets them bill items to their mobile phone accounts instead of paying through credit cards or other services. Today, mobile payment provider BOKU is announcing a range of large and small new partners in social and web games, as well as some new statistics on its growth.

Social gaming companies using BOKU include larger developers like Playfish and Slide, as well as small ones, like HitGrab (MouseHunt), Hive7 (Knighthood), Icebreaker, PageFad (Premier Football) and TheBroth (BarnBuddy). It is is also getting reach across web-based gaming portals and virtual worlds, including Aeria Games, Games-Master (Cabal Online), IGG, K2Networks/GamersFirst, Meez, Three Rings and WeeWorld.

While Facebook is currently testing out payments with rival Zong, BOKU counts Hi5 and Badoo as social networking partners. Finally, BOKU announced it has partnered with payment aggregators fatfoogoo, Gambit, Jambool, Offerpal, Sometrics, Super Rewards, and TrialPay.

In the world of mobile payments, there is often trouble with the phone service providers charging steep overhead fees for transactions, but from the consumer’s standpoint, the costs seem to be worthwhile. Why? The service is actually quite simple: Users go to make a purchase, select the “Pay By Mobile” option, put in their phone number, respond to the immediate text message with “Y,” and voila, the transaction has been made.

So far, BOKU says it has 1,000 merchants using the service and is doing one million transactions a month, with a ten percent monthly growth rate. It now serves users in 56 different countries, with Finland, Indonesia, Slovenia, and Taiwan new to the list, the company is also announcing today.

A demonstration of the BOKU service can be viewed here.