I'm unable to start either game, directly from the executable nor from Galaxy 2.0.

The games change my monitor's resolution and displays a white screen, which will then stop responding if you click on anything, waiting for several minutes does nothing.

Update. I basically have let the games sit on my SSD since making this thread, and suddenly the games seem to work just fine. Both games launch and play fine now...

The only things I could see being the reason for the games working are either updates to my Nvidia drivers, or some Microsoft C++ Redistributables getting installed during some Steam game installations. I would like to track this down to something in case I or anyone else runs into this issue in the future.