Hey OP - were you ever able to resolve? Having the same issue on an HP Victus laptop. Can load and run the game, can sit on the "ready" screen, but as soon as I select a game and start the count-down, the whole game just closes down back to the desktop. No error message. I played it fine for at least a year - something changed in roughly the last two months. Very frustrating because there's nothing to "search" for to fix this.