I'm glad it worked for you guys. And yeah it seems to be happening more often on computers with old hardwares, but still its pretty weird how just a patch can make this huge difference.
I had the same problem. When I updated the game after the Maze Engine release my game didnt get past the loading screen and I got the "failed to create pixel shader" window. I tried some commands on the launcher and what partialy fixed the problem was the command line -usesm20 but, I still noticied some annoying screen…