The lack of players in my opinion is being caused by a long beta combined with little announcements. The beta has been going on for about 4 months now, and the news page has barely changed. It gives a huge feeling that the game is dead, so people leave. Beta is beta, but the beta has been dragging on a bit.

After playing the game for a while, i think the game is very close to release like leedot said.

Btw, i just thought of a potential problem. If a game can only support so many people and only so many people will play for the whole estimated game time of 2 months, what will be done about those games? I wouldnt want to play on a large server only to have half the people leave and half the galaxy empty