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.

Impressive revenue and great profit margin! Hopefully they will be able to keep this up for 2012. It is worth noting the jump in employees (28 to 224) - I kinda wonder if they will be able to manage them all, with such a sharp increase.

Comparing to Mojang (Minecraft) Rivio have done very well, both having a huge jump in revenue from one year to the next:

$78.8m in Revenue for Mojang and $9.5m in profit before taxes. Quite the magnitude of difference in terms of profit rate, 12.07% for Mojang vs 64% Rovio.

Licensing seems to be profitable?

Source for Mojang financials: http://www.allabolag.se/5568192388/Mojang_AB

(Don't you just love that annual reports for all companies are public information in Sweden?)

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.

My personal opinion is that anything over 50% is too much. If I work hard and earn a lot of money I should at least be allowed to keep half.

That said, to reach the top income bracket and get a tax between 52-59.9% (Depending on where in Sweden you live) you have to earn somewhere around $80k/yr. Not entire sure about the number but it is in that region. I wouldn't consider that very wealthy, especially not if you live in Stockholm, expensive city to live in.

Gifts are no longer taxes in Sweden but it is likely that the tax authority will regard it as income (Or bonus) and they will pay 50-56% taxes on the lot. Quite tricky but I assume Mojang has good accountants that will work it out!

Dividend is generally taxed at 30% in Sweden so a fair bit of that will be paid in taxes. Depending on how Notch decides to pay out the money to the employees they may have to pay even more.

If it is paid out evenly and as wages it will be about 66k SEK/month per employee, that puts them well into the top tax bracket. Assuming the tax authority counts it as normal income they will be force to pat ~56% income tax a fair bit of social securities and employer tax. Assuming this they might get about (as a guesstimate) 20-25k SEK/m or 240-300k SEK total, after taxes. Not shabby at all, that is close to what an average worker in Sweden earns per year. And that is bonus alone.

None the less; Cheers Notch for thinking about your employees! : )

Edit: Gifts are no longer taxed in Sweden, luckily! but it is likely that the tax authority will regard it as income or bonus rather than a gift.

In Europe, or at least Nothern Europe, it feels like working days are actually becoming shorter. I seem to recall 37.5hrs/w being standard for most office workers, at least in Sweden. Will have a look and see if I can find a source later!

This reminds me of the "Du bist Terrorist" campagin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdIA0jeW-24 (German with English subs)

Most of these terrorist indicators seems like common sense to me. Paranoia over reason once again?

The same problem of course exists for all us non Americans. Most American TV series air months or years later, if they air at all.

I would love to be able to watch the latest and greatest in entertainment within a day of it airing but that is not possible to do with legal means so 'everyone' turns to piracy.

I do believe you cap out the taxes in Sweden at ~50k SEK/m so you would end up paying 52-59.9% in income tax on that figure. And if you live in Stockholm you pretty much CANNOT get anything decent to rent so you are forced to buy.

A one bedroom flat at 34 m^2 in a good Stockholm location you might be looking up to $300,000.

But no healthcare costs so it probably averages out in the end :o

I'm sure they would disagree with me but to be fair, will you make good decisions if you don't sleep enough and work 16 hours a day? I'm thinking sure, if this goes on for a short period of time but most people will eventually burn out.

Many can, of course, handle such working conditions but it can hardly be considered healthy in the long run.

Extremely impressive but is it really sustainable in the long run? I personally do not think that working 16hr days is good for you in the long run. It is not healthy.

What use is he if he gets burned out in a year or two? Not much I would wager. Sure one might argue that this pattern of long working hours is crucial in the first few years of a company. The question if he does so much more in 16 hours than he could have done in say ten or twelve? I doubt you can remain very efficient 16 hours per day.

As far as I know, barely anyone use Grooveshark in Sweden while practically all my (University) friends use Spotify. Doesn't Grooveshark have some quite dodgy habits when it comes to paying the artists/using legit music files? Or was that some other music streaming service?

If nothing else Spotify has received a lot of good press in Sweden simply because it is Swedish. Patriotism :) And this was a Swedish study after all.

I seem to recall that IKEA offers their more frequent flying employees business class tickets but if they choose to take the standard (slave) class tickets they get 50% of the difference.

I don't know if this is the case any more but I am reasonably certain it was some time ago, alas I have no source.

I guess it is time to start encrypting the files I got in the cloud. None of which are copyright'ed or especially secret but better safe than sorry.

Quite worrying development. I don't see why DHS should police IP.

35% isn't much to pay in taxes compared to other counties.

If you earn enough in Sweden you will end up paying a total of close 70% of your income in taxes. (income tax capped at 56% if I recall correctly and the rest if VAT etc)

The sites mentioned still resolves for me but if this is actually true... I am at a loss of words

Nice write-up!

+1 for Monty Python reference. :)