Trydisabling your antivirus program and firewall and re-launching the game. Make sure the program is not running in the background. 🛠 If you are still unable to connect, uninstall the game, restart your machine, and then reinstall game. Some antivirus programs can also interfere with the installation of the game files. Check for pending Windows updates. Verify that there are not any pending Windows updates. While you may be on an up-to-date version of the OS, there may be essential application updates waiting to install. Be sure to restart your device after installing any updates. 🛠 Reset the Microsoft Store App. You can find instructions on how to do Rightclick the Windows icon on your taskbar and then go to " Programs and Features ". Click the Turn on Windows features on or off. Click the little + sign next to " Legacy Components ". You want to make sure the " DirectPlay " and " Legacy Components " both have a check mark. Ageof Empires 3 Definitive Edition Not Launching. If you're facing challenges when trying to launch Age of Empires 3 on your Windows 10 system, compatibility issues might be causing the problem. These issues can arise due to differences between the game's programming and the way Windows 10 operates. 1year ago. Updated. Make sure you are signed into your Windows 10/11 device with the account on which you want to own the game before making a purchase. To check this, Thenyou can restart your computer and see if the Age of Empires 2 not launching issue has been fixed. Solution 3. Disable the Age of Empires 2 Launcher. According to some users on the community, the Age of Empires 2 not working on Windows 10 issue can be resolved by disabling its launcher. Here you may have a try. Aclean boot is performed to start Windows by using a minimal set of drivers and startup programs. This helps eliminate software conflicts that occur when you install a program or an update or when you run a program in Windows. You may also troubleshoot or determine what conflict is causing the problem by performing a clean boot. Recommended OS: Windows 10 – 64 bit, or Windows 11 Processor: 3.6 GHz 6-core (Intel i5), or AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Memory: 16 GB GPU: Nvidia Geforce 970 GPU, or AMD Radeon RX 570 GPU with 4GB of VRAM SoI have downloaded age of empires 3 and all the expansions from steam. When installing the game I get a steam box pop up saying. " installing micro soft direct x for Windows step 1/4" After a few mins I get a pop up that asks if I want to allow age of empires 3: the war chiefs to make changes. I press yes. FixAOE 3 Compatibility Issue. If the above steps do not work, try the following process to fix the age of empire 3 initialization failed on windows 10. Navigate to this directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam iHsaxO6.