Starcraft won't open, stuck showing as "Playing Now"

[Hyflex-2597]

Hi,

This issue has happened multiple times where the game refuses to launch, it shows as “Playing Now” within the Battlenet launcher.

• Battle.net won’t launch the game
• The desktop shortcut won’t launch the game
• Closing and re-opening Battle.net doesn’t fix the issue.
• Reinstalling Battle.net doesn’t fix the issue either.

The fix for it every time is to:

1. Press CTRL + SHIFT + ESC to load up Task Manager
2. Click on the “Details” tab instead of the default “Processes” tab
3. Find “Starcraft.exe”
4. End Task

There is a thread from 6 years ago where Drakuloth, Caterpepi and Zuvykree all replied suggesting that it had been reproduceable, a fix had been found and a fix was deployed but clearly the issue has reared it’s head again.

Can't load SCR anymore, "Game is running" but it's not

Same here. All started a few days ago with a game update. Bad patch? Blizzard working on this problem?

Maybe it’s time to add an option within the Battle.net launcher when a game is “Playing Now” for one of the following:

1. Expand the button rightwards and add red block with a stop icon.
2. Add a context menu to the Options cog for “Force Stop”.
3. Change the button from “Playing Now” to a red “Force Close” because technically users don’t need to see that it’s “Playing Now”; it’s a useless option.

If any of the above options are clicked it would ask if you want to force close the game; which would close all know processes for the game & unhook/deregister any dlls; This same process can be applied for all games.

You could if you wanted make the popup have 3 options to choose from…

1. Switch to Game (Activate the correct window); which would be a blue button.
2. Force Close (Force close all known processes); which would be a red button.
3. Cancel (Closes the popup); which would be a grey button.

It would significantly improve the launcher; it’s similar to how Steam handles running games where you can force close them via the launcher.

Thanks