Where are all the players?

Since I activated my key about 5 days ago, I've been playing 1-3 games/day. I have noticed that the game lobby is usually listing about 300-350 active players in 200-250 games when I'm logged on (I'm in the US).

Are these numbers accurate? Does it seem to anyone else that there should be more active players now (maybe not?)? Are they all in private games that I can't see?

A couple of things I'm wondering:

How many beta keys have been activated, and what percentage of total keys sent does that represent (there were over 44,000 Kickstarter supporters that I believe have all gotten keys, plus however many have bought in through Steam Early Access).

Is Uber happy with the number of beta participants so far? Above or below expectations?

I think the game is awesome, even in this larval state. I want more people to play with! Tell your friends!

Those numbers are accurate. It's just lots of people in game. Those numbers also probably include the people that are playing against the AI.

I do know there are 10s of thousands of players with the game.

The participation will go up quite a bit when new units are added and/or when more orbital stuff is added, like the Unit Cannon.

From my personal experience with friends most casual gamers don't bother with beta's. I'm trying to get more friends to play it but as it is still beta they don't see point. Beta doesn't appeal to me, I have played quite a few MMO's in beta and gotten bored of the game before release.

Actually, if you look on the steam charts http://steamcharts.com/app/233250 then you can see that it is only about 200 people. Although I will admit this is only for people playing through steam, it is the most likely way people will find out about the game.

It is probably half the number.

Also, that is any one time. Multiply that by 12, and you have 2400. That's daily only on steam. Then there are every other day players.

There are people. The numbers in beta don't do it justice. It will be better on release.

Btw, doesn't CoD count the players on within the last hour? That and it being generally popular compared to less people into rts games. That is why the numbers seems different, and not rightfully so.

Not everyone plays on Steam. Some people play through the Uber Launcher, and if they do, they aren't tracked on Steam.

Very helpful to have the Steam charts - thanks for that.

Steam implies ~1,600 daily players, so unique players is probably much higher, at least 2x that number, I'd guess.

If the Game Lobby number includes Steam users, which seems likely, then Steam likely represents 50-70% of total players, which implies a total active player population of 4,000-6,000.

This implies that less than 5% of the Backer population is playing, so far. Certainly a lot of upside!

Is there a way for Kickstarter Backers to transfer their key into Steam? If so, and a lot of people have done that, then it would change the math (although it's already quite unscientific).

Really, the key works for both kind of.

You use the game key to make your account work with the game, which you need to do to login and play. You use the steam key you can generate (or buy it off steam) to enter and get the game added to your steam library. The steam key generated doesn't replace the other key, it just gives you a steam-library activation for the game.

So at any time you can use either. I will now proceed to activate with my Steam just so I can review this game