Try to reinstall DirectX.

I'll give it a shot, but not until tomorrow. Thanks for the quick response.

Well Antales, I ran the DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer, and it said the latest version is already installed and then closed without giving an option to reinstall. I then updated Win10, because DirectX is now included in Windows. Finally, I pressed the play button in my Steam Library. After a couple of seconds, the play button simply reset to "play" again. To double check, I went into the game file and initiated "launcher.exe" which resulted in the 0xc000007b error message. Is it time to try to get a refund from Steam?

Error 0xc000007b means that your installation is invalid. Unfortunately it's not connected to the game itself, but to the 3rd party libraries installed by Steam. So there is not much I can do about it. If you would like a refund, it's your right. Please do that.

I'm not quite ready to give up on this game. Can you educate me a little about these 3rd party libraries? Is it possible to do a better installation outside of Steam?

I would gladly do that if I could. Unfortunately it's some kind of problem with your system. Something was not properly installed and now it fails to work. What is wrong exactly that's a question in itself.

Did you try to validate game files via Steam?
Also, what OS do you have?

Yes I validated the files, and my OS is Windows 10 Professional.

Ok. The next thing you could try is to reinstall Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 x86. Not the Studio itself, but a Visual C++ Redistributable. You can download it from the Microsoft site.

I think that's an excellent idea, especially since that's exactly what I was planning to do.