Any game that has a special label like "Game" will never start up.
Any game that has a special label like "Game" will never start up.
Hey everyone! I've been struggling to fix this problem for a long time, maybe two years or more. I talked to game support teams and Reddit tech help, but they didn't help me either. Here is what my situation looks like: I bought a gaming PC about four years ago. Around two years ago, something weird started happening on that PC. Suddenly, any program labeled as "game" wouldn't start up. This includes games from Steam, other launchers, even emulators. Everything else still works fine, like media players and Google Chrome. Only games are blocked. The processes still show up in the task manager, but with almost zero CPU usage. When using a launcher for a game, the launcher opens normally, but the actual game doesn't start. This glitch seems random sometimes after leaving the PC on, especially if I leave it unattended while eating or doing other things. One thing that happens is, I'm playing something and then close the game, click on another one, and boom—can't play anything at all anymore. The only fix I found so far is to force restart my PC (by pressing the physical button). If I try restarting by just clicking "Restart" in Windows, it won't actually turn off; it keeps staying on forever refusing to shut down properly, forcing me to press the actual hardware button. So far, I've tried excluding all games from antivirus scans and other checks (I use Norton), but the problem still happens there too. Updating the graphics card works for about two weeks, then things start happening again. I also did my best to figure out patterns by looking at what happened in the last session, how long it lasted, which programs were used, or anything else, but nothing seems to repeat outside of trying a game and getting blocked. I tried tutorials for flushing DNS, clearing cache, deleting temporary files, searching for outdated drivers, but all of those didn't work either. Any help would be greatly appreciated; I'm losing my mind with this issue. Specs: System: Windows 10 CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-9400F @ 2.90GHz GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 MotherBoard: ASRock B360M Performance RAM: 16GB HDD: 2TB (Toshiba HDWD120)
It looks like this might be an issue with the operating system. Generally speaking, that isn't a problem you can fix on its own.