Symptom guide

It will not install, or it installs and will not open

Installation problems look alike from the outside and have very little in common underneath. This page separates the download stage, the installation stage and the first launch, because each one fails for different reasons and the checks do not transfer between them.

Stage one: the download stops, stalls or fails near the end

Large game clients are among the biggest single files most people ever download, and the size alone produces failure modes that smaller downloads never hit. A download that consistently fails at roughly the same point is behaving differently from one that fails at a random point, and the distinction is the most useful thing you can establish.

Consistent failure near the end of a large download points at free disk space. Installers frequently need room for the compressed download and the expanded installation at the same time, which can be close to double the advertised size. The space check people run tends to be the space the finished game needs, not the space the process needs while it is working.

Failure at random points points at the connection or at whatever is inspecting it. A connection that drops briefly is invisible while you are reading a page and fatal to a single long transfer. Security software that scans downloaded files can also time out on very large ones, and some network equipment quietly limits long-running connections.

1. Check free space against roughly twice the download size. If the margin is thin, clear space before retrying rather than after another failed attempt.
2. Note where it fails. The same point every time, or a different point every time. This single observation decides which of the two branches above you are on.
3. Try the download on a wired connection if one is available. This is a diagnostic step, not a permanent recommendation — it tells you whether wireless instability is involved.
4. Pause and resume rather than restarting. Most launchers resume from where they stopped; starting again from zero wastes hours and tells you nothing new.

Stage two: the installer is blocked, removed, or refuses to run

An installer that disappears from the downloads folder between finishing and being opened has generally been quarantined by security software rather than lost. An installer that opens and then reports that it cannot continue is usually a permissions problem. The two feel identical and are not related.

Security software acts on unfamiliar executables, and a freshly published game client is unfamiliar by definition. This is the software doing its job with imperfect information, and the correct response is to verify where the file came from rather than to disable the protection. If the file came from the publisher's own site or from a distribution platform you use, it can be treated as known. If it came from a search result, a video description, a forum post or a file-sharing site, the quarantine may well have been correct, and the answer is to obtain the installer from the source instead.

Permissions failures have a different signature: the installer runs, gets a short way in, and reports that it cannot write somewhere. On a shared or managed machine — a family computer with a standard user account, or a work laptop — this is the expected outcome rather than a fault. Installing to a location the account does not own will keep failing however many times it is retried.

Stage three: it installs, and then nothing happens

A clean installation followed by a launcher that flashes and closes, or an icon that does nothing at all, is the most frustrating of the three stages because there is no error to read. Four causes account for most of these.

A copy is already running

Many launchers refuse to start a second instance and close silently instead of explaining. A previous session that did not shut down properly can leave a process running invisibly. Checking the running processes before anything else costs a minute.

Graphics drivers

A game that cannot initialise a display device will often exit rather than report the problem. Drivers supplied through a general operating system update are sometimes older than the ones the hardware maker publishes, and this is one of the few situations where updating drivers deliberately, from the hardware maker's own site, is a sensible early step.

A missing runtime component

Desktop games rely on shared libraries supplied by the operating system or bundled with the installer. When one is missing or has been replaced by another application, the game exits immediately. Reinstalling the game's own bundled prerequisites is usually offered as a repair option in the launcher.

An overlay or capture tool

Software that draws over the game — capture tools, chat overlays, performance monitors — hooks into the same display path the game uses. When it does not recognise a newly released or newly updated title, the result is an immediate exit. Closing that software entirely, not just its overlay setting, is the test.

It worked yesterday and does not work today

This narrowing is worth treating as a separate case, because it removes most of the causes above. A game that ran last week did not develop a permissions problem or a hardware incompatibility on its own. Something changed, and the useful work is identifying what.

The usual candidates are an operating system update applied overnight, a graphics driver update, a game update that has not finished, or a security product that updated its own definitions and now treats a file differently. On laptops there is a fifth: a change in power profile, which can leave a machine using integrated rather than discrete graphics without announcing it.

Where installation sits in the wider picture

How a game reached your machine changes which of these branches applies. A title installed through a distribution platform usually has a built-in file verification tool that compares what is on disk against what should be there, and that tool resolves genuine corruption far faster than a reinstall. A title installed from a publisher's own launcher has its own repair function. A browser-delivered game has no installation stage at all, so a problem that looks like installation is actually a browser question.

The category most of these questions arrive from is the battle collection role-playing game, which tends to ship as a publisher's own desktop client. Raid: Shadow Legends is the title in that category this site has a commercial relationship with, and the distribution material we work from lists desktop clients for Windows, macOS and Linux, with the path after the link described as registering, installing and starting the tutorial. System requirements are published by the vendor rather than by us, and reading them before a large download is time well spent.

Visit the Raid: Shadow Legends website

Paid link. KOKSAKI s.r.o. is paid a commission by the advertiser if you register and install after following it. The price to you is the same either way, and the commission had no bearing on anything written above.

When none of this helps

At some point the honest answer is that the problem is not one you can solve from your side, and continuing to change settings makes it harder for anyone else to help. Two things make that handover useful.

• Write down the exact text of any error, including any code. Support teams match on those codes, and a paraphrase is much less useful than a transcription.
• List what you have already tried and what changed each time. This prevents being walked through the same steps again and often identifies the cause on its own.

Then approach whoever supplied the game: the publisher for a direct client, the platform for a platform installation. If a payment is involved and the game cannot be made to run at all, the question stops being technical and becomes a consumer one, which our purchases and refunds page covers.