SCVNGR is introducing a pay-by-QR-code mobile payments experience called LevelUp in San Francisco and New York Wednesday, after an eight week pilot period in Boston and Philadelphia.

With the launch, SCVNGR is fully committing to an entirely new direction for LevelUp. The startup previously released LevelUp as a hybrid daily deals and location-based experience.

LevelUp, on the second go-around, scraps the experience of old for one centered on offline transactions.

Consumers link a credit or debit card to LevelUp, receive their own personal QR codes for payments, and can then scan their codes to pay at participating merchants and opt-in to store loyalty programs.

Roughly 500 merchants in Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York have agreed to accept LevelUp payments and will be using a provided terminal, running Android software, for scanning codes. Merchants can use LevelUp to offer customers financial incentives in the form of credits; credits are automatically redeemed by the customer when he or she spends a designated amount of money. A loyalty offer, for instance, would reward a customer with a $5 credit for spending $50 via LevelUp.

In essence, SCVNGR is chucking the pure daily deals play for a romp in the mobile payments hay. The company's approach clearly borrows from Starbucks's successful mobile payments system. It will compete with mobile payments systems such as Google Wallet -- oddly enough, Google Ventures is an investor in SCVNGR -- and Square Card Case, a pay-with-your-name system. LevelUp also closely resembles Kuapay, another pay-by-QR-code mobile payments platform.

The new LevelUp, says SCVNGR founder and CEO Seth Priebatsch, has been performing beyond expectations in test markets. When a merchant offers an incentive to attract first time customers, the customer spends on average 5.7 times the incentive on that one visit, he says.

But hype aside, it's hard to ignore that LevelUp version one only just launched in March and was swiftly killed off weeks later. It would seem that the young startup is grasping at straws. And with a founder so heavily focused on game mechanics, it's not hard not to feel like we, the consumers and the media, are being played here.

Not so, says Priebatsch. "What we're trying to do, as always, is build a game layer on top of the world," he says. "We have one product that delivers that game layer in a social way, and one product that delivers that in a transactional way."

And on the subject of competing with Google, Priebatsch adds, "Google knows that Google Wallet is a five year play at the earliest. … We are a right now play. We are an everybody play."

SCVNGR, says Priebatsch, will aggressively introduce LevelUp in major metropolitan markets at the start of 2012 -- unless it changes course again. LevelUp will cost merchants $55 per month after a free three month trial.

SCVNGR the location-based social application will continue business as usual. It has just under two million users, Priebatsch discloses.