Looking for some advice - What now?

Hi,

I’ve been going back and forth on the answer hub over a particular Android issue for the last 10 weeks now, and it’s basically going nowhere at this point. This wouldn’t be a problem if (for example) this was a minor tool chain issue, but this is a class A, severe crash. One which is stopping us from releasing our games on Android.

For those that are interested (it’s very long) the answer hub thread in question is here. The TL;DR version of it is this:

  1. We ran an Android BETA of our second game. Two out of the nine people that gave us feedback, complained about a fatal crash when signing into Google Play.
  2. Two devices were seeing the issue and we weren’t able to find a work around for it (we even rebuilt the project from the ground up at one point).
  3. We reported the issue to Epic on December 17th and they came up with a fix reasonably quickly. But when we tested it, it didn’t help at all.
  4. Since then the thread’s gone nowhere, seemingly because Epic don’t have access to either of the two devices we reported, and so can’t reproduce the issue.

Now, there’s a few things to consider here:

  1. We don’t know how many devices are effected by this issue. Out of the 9,800 Android devices that we support, it may literally just be these two. But as we only had feedback for nine of those 9,800 devices, that seems like it’s either an extremely unfortunate coincidence, or it’s a much bigger problem than just two devices. We’re not willing to release a game that could just get flooded with negative one star reviews on week #1 because “It’s rubbish - It won’t even start”.

  2. One of the devices (Alcatel Pixi 4013x) seeing the issue was used during our previous game’s BETA (UE 4.9) without issues. So we bumped that game up to UE 4.10 and tested it again: The same crash occurred. That confirms it’s NOT a project issue. For the record, these phones are dead cheap (£25), so we went and bought one for ourselves, allowing us to test if this issue had been fixed without having to constantly send out new builds to users.

  3. We don’t have the resources to do anything about this ourselves. There’s only two of us working on this. And while I’m a gameplay programmer, I don’t know the first thing about digging into engines and solving hardware issues. Let alone on the Android platform. This basically leaves us at the mercy of Epic’s support team.

Sooooo…

At this point I feel like I’m getting fobbed off on the answer hub. It’s been five days since I requested an update on the situation. And that’s four days after I responded to the previous reply I received which, frankly, felt like it was asking a really silly question / stepping around the issue completely (so that’s nine days since that last response now). Before that, another 7 days of waiting for a response from a crash log that I was asked to provide. You get the idea. Again - this is a significant issue and it’s taking a week at a time to get even the most basic of responses. I get that Epic are busy and probably have hundreds of important issues to deal with, but again, this is a class A bug with 100% reproduction rate, on two different devices.

Now we’re sitting on a completed project, which we can’t release, with seemingly no fix in the pipeline at ALL, and I have no idea what to do next.

Does anyone have any thoughts on suggestions on this? For example, is there some way I can escalate the issue?

Cheers.