Why does the play button on the xbox game pass app do nothing?

Hello Austin, this is Manuela. I'm an Independent Advisor and community user like you, ready to assist with this.
Not a Microsoft employee.

I understand that you’re having some trouble when trying to play game pass games. Let’s try to sort this out.

For this purpose, I want to ask what procedures you tried to fix this so far?

Meanwhile, may I know if you tried creating a game desktop shortcut and clicking on it to see if that helps?

Thanks for providing the screenshots, Austin!
This seems to be some kind of corruption, let’s try to isolate the inconvenience even more. Please try each possible solution below:

1. Do a clean boot on your Windows PC. For that, please follow this article.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-t...

2. Create a new administrator user on your PC and try downloading / playing games from there:
https://support.microsoft.com/windows/create-a-...

3. Run the SFC tool in order to find and repair possible system corruptions:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/for...

Hi!

I’ve tried the desktop shortcut and nothing happens when I click the shortcut.

As far as the other fixes I’ve tried, I’ve downloaded the Microsoft store through powershell as well as the Xbox insider app. That didn’t seem to do it either.

If it helps diagnose the issue, I’d get windows error messages several minutes after attempting to play games.

Hello!

Here are some of the error messages i was able to produce when attempting to launch games.

Let me know if I can provide any more details!

Thanks!

Hello Austin, I appreciate it if you can share screenshots about these errors.

Meanwhile, I can suggest you to verify the following:

Verify if all the Xbox services are running in your PC:
For this, search Services by using the Windows search functionality and look for the next services once you open the program:

IP Helper
Xbox Live Auth Manager
Xbox Live Game Save
Xbox Live Networking Service
Gaming Services

Then do this for each service: Right-click on it and select Properties. In Startup type, make sure it’s set to Automatic.

If the service isn’t started, click Start > Click Apply and OK to save changes, restart your PC and try again.

**If you're not able to do this with Gaming Services you can skip that part.