The black screen can happen after clicking "launch" in the SC launcher. What happens is: instead of having the loading screen, you get a black screen and you can't tab out (Win 8.1 issue) So what you do is: Right after you hit "launch", you click on the SC launcher icon in the task bar (should be enough time for that). SC should now start loading the way it was ment to be. Note: Some black screen problems with Win 8.1 are based on things like driver problems of your graphic card or some other update issues. This is a solution you can try if everything else you did (like updating the driver of your graphic card) did not brought a solution to successfully start SC!