Hey Rudy,
You are right, I’ve rebuilt the earlier example project again after your reply and suddenly it works perfectly.
- I tried it again with a fresh project, following my own steps and with the addition of saving the scene and also putting the Game Default Map to the saved scene (a step I forgot to mention), the problem did not occur.
Unfortunately the issue for my main project remains. Hitting the Save All button had no impact on the packaged build 
I’m not sure what’s different in my main project. It is at least much more complicated and comprised of several maps, so there is not just one scene that I work with. To date I haven’t been able to find out why PIE works perfectly and in the packaged build the Tick function isn’t called. These may have been errors that got introduced and anchored into the blueprint by upgrading engine versions multiple times.