Hello everyone!
Today I’d like to ask your thoughts about how the “so far xx people registered and xx bought the game” thing in http://www.minecraft.net/.
I found it amazing but I always thought it was fake, then I started to wonder that, if every time someone registered and buy the game increases some kind of counter, then I could display it, but how does it update in real time with no refresh?
Any other thoughts about this? 
Looking at the source, yup it’s fake. There is a set rate of increase for each value 
Doing this would strain your server, especially since you’ll have to keep a connection open between the server and client for maybe a long time and constantly receive and send data.
I knew it was fake!
So he might actually have sold way more copys than that right?
But then you have http://www.minecraft.net/stats witch it’s static, so that might be the actual numbers? And then in the main web there’s a “fake” counter based on… maybe a prediction based on register/buy statics?
The values they show initially are correct. However, they have it to increase at a set rate.
It’s not rocket science to make it a real value, you just make a query to your download stats counter and your order fulfillment db. You could do it as some kind of web service thing, but the live increase i’m sure is just extrapolated, i.e. fake.