Games from arcade start up and immediately quit

Games downloaded from arcade start up, the icon bounces for a few seconds, and then nothing happens. When I try offline it prompts me to connect to the app store, and when I do it bounces for another second before not starting up further. It seems that while the app is connecting to the app store to verify my account it is somehow shut down. I made another user account with admin rights, the games start up without a problem there. However, I want to keep my current user account and preferences.

I have tried resetting all the user permissions through terminal, signing in and out everywhere, changing passwords. I even made a new user (admin) and imported the home folder. It appears that it also imported whatever files are corrupted, because in this new user profile the problem came right back.

a sudo command to remove an info file also has not worked. I think somehow arcade is blocking my macos user account even though my apple id is fully legit.

would love to be able to simply use arcade on my new laptop, any help to pinpoint the corrupted process would be nice.