FraterPerdurabo: I am really fucked off by this. The countdown timer had finished, but I was unable to load the game. Searched forums all over the internets and apparently a lot of people were having trouble with the keys not being recognised (in NA). Finally read that the the game does not release until Friday in Europe (as in at 1am on Friday morning. All of this happened during Thursday evening). Restarted Steam after 1am and the game finally loaded but it was obviously already bedtime. What the fuck is the point of having this timer in the first place if it is just full of shit. Obviously nothing from developers or Steam. And fuck pre-ordering anything else.
Pheace: No idea what to say about the timer, I couldn't even find one on the store page personally the day before it came out. It just showed the green 'You already own this game' banner for me.
Steam store did show from the start that EU release date was the 15th though, annoying as that difference between US and EU might have been. At least it released on 1AM here which was the time people were saying it would.
The whole timer thing was there after the game was released in the US, so I thought that I would have to wait for a couple of days. On Thursday, I thought about having another look at the timer and it was gone and the game showed up as available. I then spent a couple of hours trying to get it to work, until I finally found some thread that explained that the game would not be available in the EU until X (mind you, trying to extract this information from threads that are full of information on the actual game, because guess what, it was already available in other regions days before), which was completely contrary to the information provided on Steam. I do not visit any gaming portals other than GOG, so the Steam client - the platform on which I pre-ordered the god damned game - was the only source of information that I had available. Absolute bullshit.