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 :)