A possible solution for anyone who's game will not launch

[mike ehrmantraut gaming]

Hello, I recently had an issue where RDR2 would not launch from steam or from the rockstar games menu, and for anyone having the same issue I hope this can help you out like it helped me:

- Quit Steam and Rockstar Launcher (do it from task manager to be sure its not just minimized)

- Navigate to where you have it installed.... (right click RDR2 in your steam library, click properties, then click the local files tab) Go into the 'Redistributables' folder, double click on the VulkanRT.exe and install it. Also while in the folder right click on Rockstar-Games-Launcher, properties, then compatibility, and make it run as Administrator

- Go back to main folder where it is installed and make both PlayRDR2.exe and RDR2.exe run as administrator as you did in the previous step

- Launch Steam as admin manually(right click and choose run as admin), Launch Rockstar as admin manually, launch RDR2 from steam. If you see Rockstar launcher switch to showing Loading on the greyed out button then you know it worked.

P.S MAKE SURE TO QUIT STEAM COMPLETELY BEFORE running it as administrator.
Also this problem where the game doesnt start still happens to me everytime I restart my PC, so make sure if you want to play RDR2 you run Steam as Administrator when you turn on your pc.

I hope this might help some of you as it did for me!

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Redistributables already get installed on game launch.
You obviously are not launching Steam and Rockstar Launcher via Run As Admin; which is a must. To avoid this issue, never put Game Clients in OS Startup. As apps can never launch via "Run As Admin" when they launch via OS Startup.

VulkanRT.exe will not install for most peoples machines because they already have Vulkan runtime files in their System32 folder that are newer, thus this installer will refuse to do anything at all.

I did have this issue on Win7 though, and the only way to fix the game launch issue was to install 7-Zip, then right click that VulkanRT.exe and extract the files. Then look at the names of those files it extracts, find the files of the same name in System32 and delete them. Then copy these from RDR2 you extracted, into the System32 folder. Then the game runs perfectly fine as intended.