Japanese mobile game devs coming together in huge cross-promotion

In a massive and almost surely unprecedented collaboration, 15 Japanese mobile game developers including Sega, Capcom and Taito are joining forces through a new in-app ad network to cross-promote one another's games. As reported by Serkan Toto, who first translated the report from Japanese business newspaper Nikkei, the 15-company alliance is designed to duck around a "double platform tax" developers of game apps must usually pay to platform providers like GREE or DeNA, in addition to the fees paid to, say, Apple or Google. By driving users from game to game directly through the in-game ad network, the developers don't need to go through GREE or DeNA's Mobage platform to draw in users. Sega is said to be leading the alliance, which collectively brings in about 20 million users. According to Toto, the plan is to bring in a further 15 companies, boosting combined users up to 40 million -- rivaling the scale of GREE and Mobage's userbase.