Deadlock crashing at the Valve logo or with 0xc0000005 (fixes)
Deadlock closes at the Valve logo on launch, or freezes and crashes a few minutes in with an access violation (exception 0xc0000005) in the crash dump. There's usually no error dialog.
Also appears as: deadlock crash on startup, deadlock crashes at valve logo, deadlock 0xc0000005, deadlock exception access violation, deadlock closes immediately, deadlock not launching
These are crashes rather than an error Valve names, and they've been reported steadily on Valve's Deadlock forum since 2024. One player logged 85 crash dumps between February and August 2026, with a spike after the July 30, 2026 build, so some of them are bugs in the game itself that only a patch will fix. What's worked on the player's side is mostly a clean GPU driver install; other fixes worked for single reporters. Valve hasn't replied in the crash threads we checked.
Fix it, step by step
Clean-install your graphics driver
Download the latest driver from NVIDIA, AMD or Intel and do a clean install rather than updating over the old one. This stopped the launch crash for reporters in two separate forum threads, including the June 2026 "Game crashing at startup" thread, and players on the game's subreddit repeated it after the September 30, 2026 update.
Turn off shader pre-caching or clear Deadlock's shader cache
In Steam > Settings > Downloads, untick "Enable Shader Pre-caching", or delete the 1422450 folder inside Steam\steamapps\shadercache\. One forum reporter suggested it, with mixed results: it came back for some players.
Restore video.txt from its backup (one report)
In the game folder, go to game\citadel\cfg\, rename video.txt to video.txt.old and copy video.txt.bak to video.txt. That resets your graphics settings. It worked only partially for one reporter.
Launch in a 1920×1080 window (one report)
In Steam > Deadlock > Properties > Launch options, enter -sw -w 1920 -h 1080. One reporter said this stopped their crashes completely.
- NoteReported
Crash dumps shared on the forum point at the game's own modules (tier0.dll) and rose after specific builds. If nothing above helps, post your dump in the Bug Reports section of forums.playdeadlock.com and check the Changelog for crash fixes.
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What people are saying
Notes from players who've hit this one — no time limit, an answer from months ago is still an answer.
- Nothing reported here yet.
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