Offer set in the past issue, plus introductory offer complications

Distribution Store Presence & Configuration
1

Hello,

I thought to share some feedback. If anyone has suggestions to help, I’d be happy to hear them.

  1. Most of our games are either older titles or new ones coming very soon.
    Validation from Epic to publish on the store is understandable, but one “issue” seems like an unnecessary block to publication.

Comments
The Early Store Discovery date needs to be set to a future date, and not be set in the past.
The Launch date needs to be set to a future date, and not be set in the past.

The current settings allow you to select any date in the future. However, if Epic’s review of the game and page contents takes a good amount of time, the chances of this becoming an “issue” seems high.

Maybe granting greater control of release dates to publishers would help?
2) I think the same would help with sales and introductory offers.

We really appreciate all the documentation Epic has made! Thank you!
This section could possibly be due to be rewritten. Beyond the criteria, it doesn’t explain it very well for new users.
https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/epic-games-store/publishing-tools/store-presence/manage-discounts#create-introductory-offer

When pushing to live, you are given the option of setting a date/time. But even after doing so, it is not possible to make an introductory offer.
For a different game we published, I think this publication date was set in the stage, and after being confirmed and pushed to live, we could then set an introductory sale.

In general, I’d hope to see more power given to publishers for simple things like sales, order of screenshots, description updates, etc. This should save Epic staff from checking trivial things as well.

If the store continues to improve, I think Epic’s Store could be one of the best self-publishing platforms.

We’ll try our best to avoid the above pitfalls in the future, but any additional tips would be appreciated.

Thank you.
Best,
MediBang

2 Likes
2

I received the same issue, because there is a button in the menu saying “Enable early store discovery when published” which sets the early store discovery date to today.

Rejecting the offer then made no sense to me. :pensive:

1 Like
3

We appreciate the feedback and I have forwarded to both our engineers and documentation teams. Feedback like this will allow us to continue to push for the better user experience we strive for!

4

For the introductory offer/Launch sale, we unfortunately could not get it to work, even after trying:
Launch date unknown, pushed to live
Estimated launch date, pushed to live
Specific launch date, pushed to live

Along the way in Dev, Stage, and Live, we continuously checked to see if any of the changes would allow us to set an introductory offer.

Did we not do something correctly? Or is this just buggy? We did manage to set a previous game to have a launch sale, so I’m really trying to understand how it worked before but not now. (user error, system error?)

We’ll just have to launch without it this time and try for the next game.

Any help from Epic or the community would be greatly appreciated.

5

Hey there,

A specific launch date would be the only type of launch that could start with an introductory offer, this is because only this launch type allows for the purchase of the product. Can you confirm that you followed all the steps outlined in our Creating Introductory Offer? It is important to complete the step 2 prior to creating the discount itself in the discounts section.

If so, it should have worked without issue and we’d like to gather more information about where the issue stemmed from.

Thanks!

6

Hello KoalityControl,

Yes, I followed all the steps from the Creating Introductory Offers page, and as I mentioned, it worked for our first game. For our second game, it didn’t work regardless of the settings I changed.

Maybe the Promo Campaigns section could include the Dev, Stage, and Live steps, just as all the other sections?

We don’t have another game ready to test anything at the moment.