Statistics

[VelvetRemedy]

The game could send production and energy stats back to a server and you can go to a website and view the total production of everyone playing Factorio.

[Jap2.0]

1. What about when people are offline?
2. What if people are concerned about privacy?
3. This would be wildly inaccurate.
4. What about the fact that people use several versions?
5. What about people with horrible internet/data caps?
6. Creating another website isn't exactly trivial.

[eradicator]

7. What would be the point?

[BenSeidel]

This is one of those things that would be better done as a mod (if you could make "non-game-changing" mods it would be better). You could also encode the logic into a scenario, or drop it into the control.lua of the save game.

1) Every tick (or appropriate duration) output the current stats of the various things you want to go to your website to a file.
2) Have a helper process read the file (or you could | them together) to update your web server.
3) Profit!