Yeah, my fault. I should have guessed that it is another stinking unity engine game, the engine which is nothing but trouble. But at least other unity titles crash sometime after the game starts not before even the intro movies ....

Well, and it seems the devs, which doesn't provide a forum themselves (at least I can't find it), prefer to read and react on steam but not on GoG. So I have to write about my problem on steam, where I didn't purchase the game ... or, far easier for me, I can ask for the money back guarantee as the game doesn't even start and Screwfly could screw themselves in the future.

EDIT: Found the forums, was on the wrong page before. Now I take a look if they are willing and able to fix the problem.
EDIT 2: Indeed there is the solution. The game crashes if the gfx card doesn't support DX11 and is not able to detect this for itself, so you have to add the command line parameter "-force-d3d9". Funny fact: my notebook uses nvidia optimus and the nvidia card supports DX11 for sure, but the game crashes even if I force the game to start via the nvidia card (tried this first in fact). Yeah, unity engine and great coding skills I guess ... however, if you have an intel integrated gfx card or nvidia optimus and your game crashes you now know the fix. Just force the game to use DX9 ...

Yeah, thanks. :) As I wrote in the first Edit I found the forum, just somehow were on the wrong page before. But you are right: I should have given the link here to help others but forgot about it. :( So thanks for fixing that. :)
My point was that I needed help in the first place, but I'm also very frustrated with Unity Engine games. For quite some times I have always technical trouble with Unity Engine games but never with others. Ingame bugs, yeah, sure, but technical problems? Never, only with the Unity crap. I don't know if the engine itself is so crappy or if it is so easy to use, that unexperienced programmers are more likely to use it and make mistakes regularly. :(
However: Thank you for being willing to lend me a helping hand. :)

Oh, I had to miss that edit :-)

Btw, your thoughts about Unity Engine are interesting. Is this a very popular tool? I heard that Blizzard used it to make Heartstone. Well, they are definitely not weak devs, right? :)

As far as I can tell the Unity Engine is very popular at the moment because it is a multiplatform engine to the extent you can easily provide a game on smart phones as well as desktop PCs without investing much time into the porting. Also the engine is free under some circumstances, so especially indy devs prefer this solution. However, I had much technical trouble with Unity Engine games in the past while I never had problems with other game engines to the extent of games insta-crashing on certain points in the game or not even starting at all, related to the engine as I learned from patchlogs later or by feedback in forums.
Blizzard is for sure a studio big enough to hire professional developers, but I can't say anything about the quality Heartstone will deliver or how much problems where related to the Unity Engine and how much where related to developers without much experience. It's just something I had observed in the past and I'm at a point tending to stay away from Unity Engine games, at least if they are expensive.

Hey Wintermute,

Sorry to hear you had issues starting the game, and I'm glad you were able to sort out a solution that worked.

I own an Optimus / NVIDIA notebook myself and the game was tested on this hardware without encountering the problems you describe. That said, I have had my fair share of grief with Optimus technology so I do sympathise!

To be honest, we were disappointed that Unity doesn't provide better API options for detecting hardware capabilities, so we could have more control over tweaking things in the background. Hopefully it's something they'll attend to in future updates to the engine.