Have you ever bought a game on PC and not been able to play it?

[WOPR]

Yes I have.
Ones I've fixed after quite a bit of fiddling: Skyrim, New Vegas, XCOM, Magicka
Ones I still can't get working: Magicka Wizard Wars, Just Cause 2, and Strike Suit Zero (It doesn't like my video card apparently)

Oh and Nexuiz for a different reason that steam *still* owes me a refund for. When they pulled it from their market it disabled the game for playing much like Dark Spore (which I didn't buy just read about). But the game still works, it just won't run because of steam.

 

[Edl01]

The Stanley Parable. It just doesn't run, I'ver tried everything. Fortunatly I borrowed a friends laptop and played it on that, but it was a pain.

Dark Souls. My device manager is broken and can't detect any devices on my computer, and the drivers on my Xbox360 pad don't work properly for Dark Souls because the button mapping is all wrong. I tried to get help to fix the device manager and I've tried every solution other than wiping my hard drive and putting it back to factory settings. It's a shame because before the Error happened I had just gotten to O&S on my no estus flask run, and getting to that point again on another version of the game is way mroe trouble than it's worth!
Don't worry though, I just bought it again on Xbox, I love Dark Souls to much to let such a small thing get between us.

 

[KB13]

For me it was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, I get past the tutorial and met Vao and Zaalbar then crash trying to walk through a door to get to the next part of the game, before Disney bought and killed Lucas Arts, I had been trying to find a solution for this problem, never did find out what was wrong, and still haven't. I've been told this is one of the better Star Wars games, so i'm peeved that this one DOAed me.

Gotta say though my favorite PC game that did work for me was Beyond Good & Evil. Engaging story-line, a female heroine that isn't tits and tush, and the side quests aren't fetching or escorting.

 

[Rariow]

When I bought Risen I was using a really old rig that couldn't handle it, running it at something terrible like 2 or 3 FPS even with all the options at minimum. Luckily, I'd already ordered the components to upgrade, and was able to run it perfectly at max options a week later.

I bought a faulty copy of the Hobbit game that came out in all the way back in 2003-ish which crashed after the first level. Gave it back, they gave me one that did work, and boy was I glad: It is a real unknown gem.

I don't know whether it was the game's fault or it just happened to happen when I started playing it, but my GPU (funnily enough, the same one that saved me in the Risen incident) started overheating badly with Far Cry 3, which made me unwilling to play it for the next four or five months.

There were some shenanigans going on with Windows XP service packs when I tried to play Arkham City that meant the game wouldn't launch or play or anything else. By pure coincidence I happened to decide to download three or four year's worth of updates whilst still having the install, and it worked upon my token attempt before going to uninstall. It sat there for a good month, though, since I'm the laziest bastard when it comes to uninstalling stuff.

The biggest example, however, was probably BioShock 2, which I've tried playing on at least four different machines, and hasn't started on a single one. BioShock 1 and Infinite work fine, and I haven't heard of anyone having much trouble with BioShock 2, but for some reason I haven't ever made it to the start screen of that game. I hear I'm not missing much, but it's more a matter of pride at this point.

 

[Evil Smurf]

I found Saints Row 2 to be unplayable, badly optimised for a keyboard and a mouse, and the graphics where not as good as 3 or 4.

 

[Ieyke]

300ish games and maybe 3 times I know of where that happened.

Iron Grip:Warlords was simply a weird little indie game that was janky and didn't work right for me.

RAGE was too much for my old PC to handle. Works fine on my current PC.

I just forgot the 3rd one...

Oh. Battlefield 2142. Because EA is a piece of shit and totally ruined my ability to run/play one of the coolest FPSs ever made.
My entire group of friends frequently goes "You know what I miss? BF2142."
None of us can get it to run. It just got glitchier and glitchier as time went on and EA just never bothered fixing it. Eventually it just stopped working. Assholes.

 

[Lord Doomhammer]

I have three games that are unplayable for me right now, due to what I think is a bug in my graphics card. Not the driver, the card.

Torchlight 1 and 2, and Minecraft.


I have no idea why, but when I play these games, at a random time during playing it, my screen will go black, sound will cut out(usually), and the computer will completely stop responding until I force the power off.

I get no BSODs, no memory dumps to examine for problems, nothing in the event logs except for "system was improperly shut down(yeah, no shit)"


I watch both CPU and GPU temps while playing games, and nothing's overheating. I can play games like Guild Wars 2 on max settings with very little trouble, so I simply don't know what the problem is.

The problem has continued to happen across multiple different OS installs(Windows 7, Windows 8 RC, Windows 8, Windows 8.1), fresh installs each time, all drivers always at their latest versions.

I'm confuzzled.

I was going to suggest checking temps with Hardware Monitor... but if it's not that then there's probably something wrong with the game installation.

How is your memory utilization? How much ram and what components are you using?

If you have a desktop, try removing the GPU and driving display off the CPU integrated graphic (minecraft at least). This will tell you for sure if it's a problem with the GPU or something else.

If this happens on other programs (similar lockup/black screen) it could be a sign of a failing HDD.

As always PC Gaming Wiki [http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Home] has lots of answers for nearly every game.

 

[nyysjan]

Few times.
Usually because the DRM is broken.
Either DRM servers have been taken offline (or the whole service has gone belly up), the "code" is already used, or completely wrong format to the one program is asking.

Sometimes i can pirate the whole thing of the web, other times i have just said fuck it and returned it to store.
Mostly happens with older games.

 

[SweetShark]

Yep, only one time, but for an entirely different reason:

When I was younger I went with my school in a trip on Italy. We found Videogame store and I found very cheap a very good game with the name "Far Cry" [yep, I am old]. I bought it and when I at last put the dvd to install the game I realised something terrible......

It had only Italian for language selection.

At first I said F*CK, I wasted my money and I can't play the game!!!
NOPE!!! I will italled and I will play it!!!!

I somehow manage to intalled the game and I started playing the game...........only to stop playing because I heared the hero of the story talking Italian.............
I started checking in the options to change SOMETHING desperate in English.....but nothing ............fffffFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF********************************************************************************CKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And that why I took my lesson why shopping Videogames in other Countries is sometimes bad.....[exception Amazon and Steam]

 

[Mersadeon]

More than once - and often, it is my own stupidity.

I bought Payday 2. I thought "well, the first one ran perfectly on my laptop! This one doesn't look much more graphically intesive. It should work out fine." It didn't.

On Steam Sales I sometimes buy games that I KNOW don't run on my laptop, but they are so cheap that I want to have them for the day that I get a tower again.

Dungeon Keeper 2, unfortunately enough. Not because it's too hardcore for my laptop, but because the initial GOG release was crappy and didn't work on a number of PC's.

And it took ages until I could play Starbound.

 

[endnuen]

Yep.
Which is also the prime reason I prefer my PlayStation. Much easier.

 

[wAriot]

Aside from not being able to play those pesky Vista/W7-only games in my old XP desktop, I've always been able to fix whatever problems they threw to me.
On the other hand, since I upgraded to 7, I have a lot of good games to play now.

Dark Souls was one of the most problematic to "fix", because I had to install several mods just to make it playable with KB+M (I can't stand playing with controllers).

 

[SquidSponge]

Yes.

Literally:
World of Goo just won't launch, causes the screen to do all kinds of weird shit then spits an error message.

One of the Ghost Recon games I picked up for about £1.50 once runs at about 0.01fps (no, really, <1 frame per minute). I think(?) my Google-Fu eventually revealed that the software was speaking a long-dead language that my modern graphics card didn't know how to interpret.

Figuratively:
Carrier Command: Gaea Mission.
[rant]
It very quickly becomes impossible on account of the fact that you can't control everything personally all of the time, and sometimes you actually need more than a single unit to get something done beyond the first couple of missions - and yet the friendly AI is retarded on scale that can only be described as "legendary". It literally can't drive a land vehicle 20m in a straight line over flat, unobstructed ground, I shit you not. It's just... Why? How? I don't even? Even more perplexing is why they decided the notably unimpressive enemy AI was apparently too good to give to the player's units. Add to that the world's most obnoxious mouse acceleration (with no option to disable) and this game has pretty much shot itself in the foot. With a rocket launcher. Admittedly I did (eventually) get a mouse acceleration fix (which wasn't exactly simple either to find or apply, and required disabling the OS mouse acceleration too), and there's an AI "remedy" which, I hear, brings it up to "playable", but no more - I could probably tell you more had I got it working - but even the fan-made fix used an obsolete version of some programming language or another, and was thus incompatible with my OS. Perhaps if I was a professional programmer or computer scientist I might've been able to play this game?
[/rant]

I'm sure there are more, but those are what occur to me immediately. I've never had too much trouble playing a game I've paid full-price for, though. Mostly it's archaic software from games that pre-date one's OS by a version or two that cause the big issues, and they're almost always fixable, not to mention cheap.

 

[Reyold]

Rarely, but one recent instance was Mark of the Ninja. I nabbed it while it was on sale, but it kept crashing on launch. Turns out the Mac version wasn't working at the time. Thankfully, they've fixed it, because this game is fantastic.

 

[Alistar_Helloise]

My first Halo game ever, Halo Combat evolved. Tragically enough this is when I learned that not just any PC can play a game at the tender age of 13.

 

[Nosferatu2]

Dark Souls, and Fallout 3, mostly because I can't be asked to fix the problems.

 

[BeanDelphiki]

Manhunt. It was the first game I ever bought off Steam, basically before I understood much about Steam. I had been looking for it for ages, and when I realized it was available on this service, I made a Steam account and eagerly bought it.

It plays well for five minutes...and then it has a game-breaking bug. Essentially, there is a door that is supposed to open which does not. Without going through that door, there is no further progress in the game. Apparently this has been the case since a Steam update to the game in 2010 (according to the forums). They are still charging $9.99 for it, and the game absolutely does not work. The people who possessed the game in 2010 came up with a fix for it, available for download then, but not now. Yeah. I meant to contact Steam for a refund, but then life got in the way, and yeah. I've had the game for far too long now. It's just totally unplayable. Shame - it looked really nice and ran smoothly on my computer.

I got a new laptop that can run more games, but it's a Windows 8 machine, and Fallout 3 was a ***** to run. It would get to the point of shooting the radroach in the tutorial section, and then crash to desktop every time, no matter my settings. I did finally get it running by following some tutorials.

I bought the "Back to the Future" games off GOG.com, and they absolutely would not even launch. Never fixed it. But I don't feel too bad now, because I picked them up through the Telltale Humble Bundle, minus what I would have offered for that set. They run through Steam.

That's all I can currently think of, but naturally there's been more.

 

[Blaze the Dragon]

The first game I really bought for myself on PC, so I guess the point where I first really became a PC gamer, was the Orange Box on its launch day, physical copy. I popped it in, installed everything (although I actually bought the entire box just for Portal, cause I had seen previews of it and wanted to play Portal the instant it came out) and it turned out my Computer didn't actually have a video card. And as such none of those games in the bundle worked. I think it was about 6 months later I finally got around to upgrading my computer for the first time ever, and I finally played those games. Now though, I have a much better machine and I'm much smarter about making sure games will run before buying/downloading them.

 

[Padwolf]

The only game so far that I wasn't able to play properly when I got it is Fallout 3, but after a few google searching I found out the issue was with the windows games live thingy. It didn't take much to fix it, but it really was frustrating after a while. Ever since I haven't had an issue with it aside from the odd crash or two but those happen rarely for me. I have been lucky!

 

[michael87cn]

Yeah pretty much every single game I bought a decade ago is no longer playable.

...But yeah I have also had a new game that doesn't work. It really sucks.