Midwinter Entertainment's hybrid battle royale "Scavengers" hit Early Access on Wednesday. Well, sort of.

To claim a key to the free-to-play team-based shooter, players had to watch 30 minutes of streaming the game on Twitch and request a key via a Twitch drop. However, this process did not go entirely smoothly.

In a Steam post, Creative Director Josh Holmes detailed Scavengers' first day of Early Access, explaining why Twitch viewers requested a drop but did not receive a key, and why the Steam version and not the

He explained why Twitch viewers did not receive keys even though they requested a drop and why they received keys for the Epic Store version and not the Steam version.

First of all, he stated that if a viewer applied for a drop on Twitch but did not receive a key (or received an email with no key attached), Midwinter resent a second email to everyone who had applied for a key. If the key was attached to the first email, nothing needs to be done. If you received an email without the key attached, check your inbox again.

For those wondering why they received an Epic store key instead of a Steam key,

"We are consuming Early Access keys at a tremendous rate and have switched the distribution of Steam keys for Scavengers to Epic Game Store keys. Some of you may have noticed that we have switched the distribution of Scavengers Steam keys to Epic Game Store keys," Holmes wrote.

"At this point, we've exhausted our cache of Steam keys, but we have enough keys for the Epic Games Store that we've been able to keep them available.

Why not properly release the game in Early Access and allow anyone to play without having to secure a key in a Twitch drop? The most common is Twitch drops due to concerns about server stability, Holmes said. You've seen games that flooded with tens of thousands of players on the first day and then had massive server problems that made them unplayable.

In other words, even though Twitch's drop scheme acted as a buffer for players to jump into the game en masse, Scavengers still had server problems. As a temporary solution to the server crash, the lobby was split into "shards," which had the unfortunate side effect that friends were split into separate shards and sometimes could not be invited to each other's parties.

This shard issue seems to have been resolved now, as Midwinter has implemented several server fixes that allow you to more easily join matches with your friends. If you are still having problems, we recommend restarting your Steam or Epic client and logging back in.

Update: Scavengers has completely eliminated the Twitch key drop and will allow anyone to play the game starting Saturday, May 1 at 9am PT. No keys are required.

Holmes said that once all the server issues are resolved, Scavengers "may move away from key access," and players will no longer need to watch Twitch streams to get keys, and will be able to choose whether to play on Steam or Epic and will be able to choose for themselves whether to play on Steam or Epic. There is no specific mention of when that will be, however, but we will let you know when we find out.

In the meantime, for those who are just about to dive into Scavengers, we have prepared some beginner tips and a guide on crafting and researching.