I've been watching the steamcharts religiously and while Empires' numbers are higher than its been in the past 4 years, I think that only takes into account "individual players per hour", not amount of players on at once. So tonight's peak was 66 players but Nubs may have only had 52 players at once. Still, it's promising. The real hump is getting over the single server size - once a server is full there is currently very, very little incentive to seed a second one. Really you need to double the playercount overnight to overcome that sort of challenge.
No, there really was 60+ people playing. There was a small scrim of sorts going on the beta server of about 20 people while nubs had around 44 I think. I'm pretty sure that just counts how many people have the game up at once, I don't think it really looks to see if people are playing or connected to a server.
It was a practice game between clans. I wasn't there during the scrim itself, but it was on crossroads, and it was apparently one by the new best rifleman in Empires, Light
