The closed beta opened on 21 August at 19:00 London time — and the first thing players saw was a queue. For a test you could only enter through a pre-order or the Steam Playtest lottery, that says more about demand than about breakage: the servers ran short not because of bugs but because of how many people came.
What the Drops were not
Twitch Drops went live the same day, and confusion followed immediately. To be plain: Drops gave rewards, not access. Watching a stream could not get you a key — entry stayed on two paths only, a pre-order or the lottery.
What remained
The queues cleared within hours, and the test became the studio's best argument before launch: about half a million people tried the game over the weekend, and the player count reached 105,774 at once. We measured it ourselves every ten minutes — the charts are on the stats page.