Wardogs' second closed beta wraps up today, and there's still a chunk of people who only just realized they can jump in before it's gone. The test kicked off Thursday, September 3, at 8pm in Lisbon and Luanda (same offset the developer uses for British time), and closes at 9am this Sunday morning. For anyone working off the US time zones Bulkhead posts in its announcements: it started at 12pm PT / 3pm ET on Thursday and ends at 1am PT / 4am ET on Sunday. Not a huge window, but enough to squeeze in some solid hours before the official launch on September 10. <br>Worth clearing up something that's tripping people up: this isn't the same beta from August. There was an earlier round between the 21st and 23rd of that month that turned out to be surprisingly massive — nearly half a million unique players over three days, a figure game director Howard Philpott confirmed himself in a debrief video. Concurrent players peaked at just over 105,000 on the final day, straight from Steam's own backend numbers. For an independent studio, that's a launch weekend most bigger teams don't pull off. <br>Access to this second round is still limited to players who pre-ordered (the base edition runs around $40 on Steam, with a pricier supporter tier that throws in extra cosmetics), or to those who requested access through the game's page and got lucky with an invite. One thing to keep in mind: none of your beta progress carries over to launch — unlocked weapons, levels, all of it resets once the game officially drops. And no, there's no open beta coming afterward; with the closed test ending just days before launch, Bulkhead didn't leave room for one. <br>On the Twitch Drops question, which is honestly what's been generating most of the confusion lately: the mechanic works pretty much like it does in any beta of this kind — you link your game account (usually the Steam account tied to Wardogs) to your Twitch profile, then rack up watch time on channels running the active Drops campaign. Items show up in your Twitch Drops inventory and need to be claimed manually before the campaign closes, which matters, because earning a reward isn't the same as already having it on your account. As of writing this, Bulkhead hasn't publicly detailed exactly which rewards are up for grabs in this September round, which is also roughly what happened during the August beta without much fanfare either — so the safer move is checking the Wardogs category on Twitch and your own Drops inventory directly, rather than trusting random lists floating around without a source. <br>And speaking of Twitch, the numbers from that first beta on that front are pretty wild too: close to 8,000 streamers showed the game off that August weekend, including recognizable names from the shooter scene — shroud, cloakzy, and especially The Burnt Peanut, who had a meteoric rise off the back of Arc Raiders and hit peaks north of 62,000 viewers on his own. Altogether, the community racked up something like 6 million hours of watch time between Friday and Sunday, which works out, rounding generously, to roughly 685 years of content watched. For context, the new Call of Duty's beta, running the same week, pulled in a similar player count but noticeably less pull on Twitch. <br>Bulkhead also squeezed in an announcement for The FPS Games Show, a broadcast exclusive to Twitch on September 3, where it promised more reveals ahead of the early access launch. Not entirely sure what to expect from that one — could be new content, could just be more launch marketing — but given the game's recent track record, it's worth keeping Twitch open over the next few days, on top of the beta that's wrapping up right now. Wardogs is PC-only via Steam for the time being; PS5 and Xbox Series X|S are promised down the line, with no release window yet.