Quick answer: Make the failure produce evidence: early file logging, crash capture before anything else initializes, and a support path that collects those artifacts from players.
The flash-and-gone launch is unfixable only while it produces no evidence. Instrumentation turns it into a normal bug. Here is the evidence pipeline.
How to fix it
1. Log from the first instruction
Open a log file (user-writable path) as the very first act of main() and write phase markers through init — the last line before silence names the failing phase on any machine.
2. Install crash capture before init
A crash handler (minidump writer or crash SDK) installed first catches the exceptions that early init throws — most instant exits are ordinary crashes without a reporter yet.
3. Give players a one-step report
'Press this / send this file' — a support tool or auto-upload beats asking players to find %APPDATA% paths; the difference is whether you ever see the evidence.
4. Reproduce the environmental classics
Clean VM (no runtimes), unusual locales, OneDrive-redirected folders, and read-only install paths reproduce the majority of instant-exit causes in-house once logs hint at the phase.
Catching the ones you can't reproduce
The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.
Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.
This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.
Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.