Upon further investigation, it appears that the daemon is failing to start the game server executable at all on game server start. When gameap-starter.exe runs, it creates the text files in the game server's directory, and then just outputs the command sent to it, says "Type: start", and closes. The game server executable is never triggered. (It appears the code 0 may be the console output from Windows or the daemon, and not the game server).
This appears to be related to the server start issue, but I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the installation or validation processes or not.
For an example of the console output:

Originally posted by @SugarD-x in https://github.com/gameap/daemon/issues/7#issuecomment-594398785