I'm building a game page for a game that's releasing at the end of March: https://raffomania.itch.io/knakk

I've set up CI to push updates to itch.io via butler so there are already game files there. The game will be free and I won't take donations. When I visit the game page, the downloads are accessible even though there's  a future release date set.

I'm aware that I can set the "Disable new downloads and purchases" option but that will result in a weird message on the game page ("This game is currently unavailable"). I'd like the same functionality that I assume paid games have for a future launch date.

I agree. Could be nice to also have a countdown until the release date

A countdown would be a super nice feature

I agree that a countdown would be cool but disabling downloads would be a requirement for me. I can't really publish my page right now without manually deleting uploaded files which is a major hassle.

Hey there,

When I visit the game page, the downloads are accessible even though there’s a future release date set.

To my knowledge, the release date is just metadata and is not meant to impact if the project is available or not. This means, as you mentioned, setting it to a future date will still allow users to access a project’s files.

You can go to the uploaded files of your project and tick the following box:

[ ] Hide this file and prevent it from being downloaded

This should allow you to keep pushing updates for those files with butler, and those files will not be available to users until you untick that box.

I’d like the same functionality that I assume paid games have for a future launch date.

I’m not sure paid games have that feature. The only thing I can see from my projects is the ability to accept pre-orders, which is not a feature for free games, as there is no point “pre-ordering” a game without a price.

On that note, I do agree it would be nice to have the feature for automated planned updates, so you wouldn’t need to do anything yourself. Until such a feature is implemented, I hope my solution above will work for you :)

Thanks, that per-file option is a neat workaround for now :)