How to Fix Unreal Steam Rich Presence Connect String Being Empty

If Join Game is greyed out for friends of an Unreal Steam game, the connect string is empty. The online subsystem must advertise the session through presence for the button to light up.

How to fix it

1. Enable presence on the session

Create the session with bUsesPresence and bAllowJoinViaPresence set so OSS Steam advertises it and populates the Steam connect key.

2. Advertise session info

Ensure the session settings that encode how to join are published; an advertised session updates rich presence so friends get a working Join Game option.

3. Handle the join flow

Bind the on-join-session and join-from-presence delegates so accepting an invite actually travels the player to the host's map.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unreal Engine error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.