[Solved] Help : my games minimize at launch

[BVL3K]

[Edit] There's a bunch of solutions in this thread, I detailed the one that worked for me , feel free to send feedback if you have this same problem.

So each time i try to launch a game it minimize and when I click on it I get one sec of the menu's music and it minimize again before the screen even load, so I know the game is running (not crashed or whatever) but i can't play it, i can't access anything of the game.

All my non-steam games are fine.
I tried unistall/reinstall the games/steam but the problem is still here.
I disabled the in-game steam community thing but that changed nothing.

Some games works fine like The Binding Of Isaac, FTL, L4D 2, The Walking Dead, Poker Night 2 but all the "big" games like Borderlands 2, Mass effect 2, Deus Ex or Chivalry won't anymore ... They worked fine some weeks ago when i was playing them. I never had this problem and i don't know what triggered it ..

[Roji]

Step 1 go into steam library and hit play in there on ARK
Step 2 select the option that says "Reset Game Resolution"
Step 3 The game will launch ! Now goto options and set you screen resolution and MAKE SURE you set Boarderless Window mode !!!!!!!!!!
Now the game launches every time off the desktop icon

[nogard]

Greetings.
I might have a solve but before i do let me tell you this: I have had this problem for about a month and every time i restart my computer afterwards, it works without minimizing anything. Every time i tried to play the game, it launched it in full screen but right after few seconds it went window mode, i clicked on the window mode and it popped full screen and went to window mode straight away, i restarted my system and then it was solved, BUT it's not the solve i'm talking about. whenever I launched a game either after watching few episodes of some series with my headphones plugged, or some game with my headphones plugged. So, every time I plugged my headphones the notification popped up on how i want to use them exactly, i set for headphones and pressed OK, and that's when the whole minimizing thing started to happen, I realized that only this week. SO if you are using headphones, set that notification "not to show again" and restart your computer, without that no game will minimize itself after that. Well, at least that what was causing MY games to minimize, and i'm talking any games. I hope this will work for those who has/had the same issue as me. other than that i can not help you folks with anything else, let me know if this "solve" works.
ALSO i have researched other solutions and tried most of them and none worked, so as i have seen "some notification keeps persisting" i went and disabled anything that might notify me of anything. and i no longer have the issue with minimizing games.

[WestJake]

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RIVA TURNER!! Never again!

[Call of Duty]

Hey guys. This is the first page that pops up when I google this problem, and I didn't see this mentioned:
Try disabling Steam overlay. IDK what it does; it starts out auto-enabled when you install steam. Disabling it fixed the problem instantly for me.

From https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-disable-steam-overlay :

How to disable the Steam overlay

"Make sure that Steam is open and that you're logged in.

1. In the top-right corner of the screen, click "Steam." Once the drop-down menu appears, select "Settings" if you're using a PC, or "Preferences..." if you're on a Mac.

2. Once the Settings page opens, click on the "In-Game" tab in the left sidebar.

3. Uncheck the box that reads "Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game."

4. Click "OK" to confirm the changes."

Hope this helps :)

[-tr1xy]

bez b

[ttv.siriusgaymer]

Zombi isn't running still after doing all of these things. Guess I'll just uninstall it and forget it exsists.

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by ttv.usosirius:

Zombi isn't running still after doing all of these things. Guess I'll just uninstall it and forget it exsists.

That's not the game's problem.

If you go to your Task maneger and lookk for the process you likely won't see it immediately - you have to open it up further to find the legacy processes that are open as they're the nasty little ones that keep this problem happening.

Find anything to do with Steam and close it.

Reatart your computer and it should be golden. And in future, always make sure (in case you're not) to close down Steam by exiting properly before you close the PC down. It can mitigate this issue.

[Krakatos]

Originally posted by malcolm341:

I had this same problem in Win 8.1. For me the program that was stealing focus was Adobe Creative Cloud. Uninstalling it fixed my issue.

But more importantly determining which program is stealing focus is the hard part, but this guy wrote a program to show you which application is stealing focus. Just run the program, then play the game and when you lose focus look at the process name that is printed in the dos box. If you have a second monitor run the program on it so you can see what's happening while playing the game. For me it was creative cloud. Link below to download the tool.

http://www.happydroid.com/focus

Wow, you saved the day. I had the exact same issue, and it drove me bananas (and I nearly smahed my keyboard to bits). I lost a couple of hours of my life uninstalling random programs to get back to normal, without success. Then I saw your post and that "focus" program did the trick. It showed me that Cisco WebEx was stealing the focus. I uninstalled it, and problem solved! Well done.

[vertigo]

The cause in my case turned out to be Windows display scaling. If set to anything other than 100%, which is too small to be usable at 1080 on a 14" display, it causes things to flip out when launching a game. My suspicion is that when a game launches, it causes the scaling to go to 100%, and that causes the game to lose focus and minimize, which then causes scaling to go back to 125% (or whatever it's normally set at), so it's a vicious cycle. That would explain why the left-clicking "solution" works, because you're forcing the game to stay focused during the transition to 100% scaling, and once it's done, all is good until you exit or switch away from the game.

I don't know whether this is Microsoft's or Valve's fault, and most likely it's both, but it's an inexcusable case of their massive incompetence, and it makes it extremely difficult to play games on a computer that doesn't use 100% scaling, not only because of the minimizing issue, but because it causes all other windows to resize and move around, trashing everything.

For those still having the issue, especially those solving it by left-clicking, what scaling are you using? The only possible solution I can think of is to find an alternative to scaling, but that doesn't seem likely.

[This_Guy_Again]

Setting fullscreen off and switching to boarderless does not fix the problem, it just avoids it. Running it in boarderless means it's running in a window, instead of taking full control of the monitor. Running boarderless adds more latency and can cause stuttering issues.

[WalksWithBooks]

Don't mind me doing a little necro-posting.

So, I started having this problem and quickly identified the problem. Basically any time a game was trying to start in a "weird" resolution this would happen. For me I have a 4k monitor that I like to run at 2560x1440 because I hate scaling. I tend to run my games in that resolution as well.

However, often (particularly if I'm coming back to a game after a long time) it will try to run on some default resolution that isn't that. This is easily noticed (by me) because I have two monitors so all my windows jump around.

MY SOLUTION is to try to set the resolution manually in the game's settings file but since those are held in Windows PoS OneDrive folders it's super easy to get junk files that mess up the game. If this turns out impossible then the workaround mentioned earlier in this thread helped.

I would let the game minimize then click the icon in the taskbar to refocus the window. Then, spam the left-click and the game stays focused for some reason. It took me a couple tries to get it to work (attempt 1: alt-tab to game, click -> nothing; attempt 2: taskbar select, click/menu sfx-> works). Then I just used the game options to set the resolution properly and no more minimizing problem.

[Iceira]

Thats because you fail to see the problem and was 4K even there in 2013, and win10.

and you fail to see all the missing info on spec tech.

ps.
dont forget user experince has increased from past time, and today.
but this wont be solved in old post.

im not shariff here, its pure logic, to compare old monitor with brand new and drivers to it to win10 to whatever that was OS they had back then. you cant so yeah you have a spam troll post, or whatever you will call it. Necro Thread.

steam need mass tool to lock all that BS from the past, then you are on win10. its that simple.

[VenKazi]

Originally posted by malcolm341:

I had this same problem in Win 8.1. For me the program that was stealing focus was Adobe Creative Cloud. Uninstalling it fixed my issue.

But more importantly determining which program is stealing focus is the hard part, but this guy wrote a program to show you which application is stealing focus. Just run the program, then play the game and when you lose focus look at the process name that is printed in the dos box. If you have a second monitor run the program on it so you can see what's happening while playing the game. For me it was creative cloud. Link below to download the tool.

http://www.happydroid.com/focus

Cant use this application, for what ever reason the exe wont extract from the zipped file, its saying i need administrator access from myself lol? i really could use this it would be sooooo helpful. anyways ive had this issue for 2 days now, and ive done all the basic and some intermediate troubleshooting, and still nothing... even some of the solutions on here ive tried and they do not work.

the most ive been able to achieve is with the back for blood beta, if i spam shift right click on the taskbar icon a ton, wait for a invisible window border to appear, press alt + enter, the game finally shows, and i can go into the game settings and change it to windowed borderless, but this is the only game thats able to do this for me, all the other ones still minimize.

[Leliandra]

Faced the same issue. Indications on my UI pointed to some resolution related issue using an external samsung monitor hooked up to my dell laptop. Trying several trial and error resolution changes as well as switching back and forth from my laptop monitor to my external monitor some games would become playable while others would become unplayable. Eventually I found a universal fix (for me) as per below (Nvidia GPU user. Search for equivalent if an AMD GPU user):

Nvidia control panel -> Adjust desktop size and position -> tick override scaling mode set by games and programs -> restart pc.

[Dron]

I have a similar problem sometimes, I have not figured out the cause yet, however going to task manager and right clicking on explorer and restart fixes it.