Chrono

DotA was not at all novice friendly and I do believe DotA 2 has done a lot to reduce the barrier of entry.

The UI is simply amazing at this point and all matchmaking based games should really look at DotA 2 before designing their UI, it is simply that good (in my opnion).

It seems to have worked well in TF2 and MOBA players appears to be quite accepting of paying for cosmetic stuff.

I hope for Valve's sake they will be able to pull it off as I really enjoy Dota 2.

2.75% with MasterCard, Visa and Diners Club. 3.75% with AMEX

without a card reader its 1.5 SEK + 3.5%

An estimated value of $100b, the ability to throw $1b into acquisitions and over 3000 employees - still a startup?

By such logic you can almost call Google a startup, or any other IT firm really. What exactly makes Facebook a startup by any definition?

The US still uses checks, can't expect much...

Mojang is privately held but they submit an annual report to the tax authority and once OK'ed by them in the public domain so it can be requested from the authority. There are several companies that log all registered companies and their annual reports and publish them (For a fee to get a pdf of the report) online so it is not directly public per say.

It is also worth noting that privately held companies don't have as extravagant annual reports as the publicly traded ones, just plain boring reports but the essential information is the same.

Personally I like the system for it satisfies my curiosity and I don't see any reason why a company should be able to hide their broader financials - I want the ability to check their solvency before using their services for example.

Anyone could access, at least part, of my personal tax records as well as my grades from High school (and Uni I believe). All in all it is very hard to be anonymous in Sweden if someone bothers to look around.

I agree, the margins are just too low. They are expanding and such things cost money but they are still only something like 13-15 employees at the moment but still have bad margins.

I would expect at least double the margin for a company with low distribution costs and reasonably low development costs - compared to other studios anyway.

You are welcome! :)

No really, the card readers are damn quick these days so it hardly takes much longer than paying with cash but I admit that it takes slightly longer. I would argue that most people pay their morning coffee with card in Sweden.

I have used my card all over the world, for small and large purchases, and have yet to get it skimmed - lucky I guess.

But another aspect of increased card use is that tax fraud becomes harder for the businesses as I believe the logging of card transactions are quite a lot harder to hide from the tax authority so I do see that as a positive thing.

While you have a point about carrying cash I just have an irrational dislike towards change. The damn coins are heavy, close to worthless much of the time and overall annoying.

And I have barely ever encountered a situation where the card machine is broken,at least not in recent years but it can of course happen.

'Removing' the CCV and magnetic stripe is actually a good idea - Wouldn't trust most (Swedish) places that don't use the chip to read the card data.

As a Swede I am used to always being able to pay with my card; Heading to the bar? No need to withdraw cash. Grabbing a taxi home late at night? No need to worry if you have enough cash, they accept cards.

To add to this is that electronic transfer of money to both businesses and private citizens is quick and easy. If you transfer within the same bank it is instant and takes up to a day, depending on the hour, to transfer between banks.

Insanity. I would never in my life willingly give up any of my passwords, to anyone. Especially not something that contains so much private information as Facebook. Sure, Facebook themselves may share some of that information, or all if asked by a court but generally speaking it is somewhat safe.

Want my Facebook password? No thank you, I will go somewhere else.

Ah, that might be a improvement but then the questions becomes, how does the English results become affected by me changing it to Swedish?

To be fair I do most of my searches in English and therefore it might cause irrelevant results again. Changing back and forth depending on what language I am search for is hardly ideal.

Will have a look to see how it affects my searches.

I like the idea of DDG but it is quite frankly of little use to me. For most English terms it works reasonably well but for other languages such my mother tongue, Swedish, it is more or less useless. I found most results to be close to useless but I have not used DDG to a great degree because of this issue.

I rather take relevant results results in multiple languages while being logged than less relevant results without being logged.