At the first screen with text that says "2006-2009 Rockstar Games, Inc....," the game for me is freezing and I can't find why. If anyone has experienced this and/or has a solution, please let me know, thank you.

Additional information: I'm on Windows 10, and even the updated version of the game tends to freeze. I also had a thought that perhaps the game is overclocking, so i tried limiting frames and it didn't work...

Try launching it via a shortcut with the following in the target field (your path may differ): "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Grand Theft Auto IV\GTAIV\LaunchGTAIV.exe" -noprecache -nomemrestrict -norestrictions

That helped quite a bit actually, thank you very much. But it seems that when I try to put it on the very high settings that I had before, it froze. Could that be another culprit to the freezing?

Just as an update, the game seems to load in for a couple of tries, but as I put in my settings whether it was really high or turning down the settings, it stills randomly freezes. The third time I loaded up IV, it still froze on the same screen

As an update, there was a fix that I found on a random steam forum, but I'll put it here for convenience. By going into the properties of the LaunchGTAIV.exe shortcut, going to the compatibility tab and checking "Disable Fullscreen Optimizations" fixes the game freezing at any point of the game. Two days in and no freezing yet.

what about a unsteam copy