XCOM for Mac OS X crashes on startup

Since Feral Interactive's OS X port of XCOM: Enemy Unknown is now available on Steam, I decided to give it a whirl. After installing it however, I ran into a problem: When I click "Play" in the launcher, the game immediately crashes. What's up with that?

It turns out somebody at Feral is actually reading crash reports. I received an e-mail from them out of the blue today:

This issue is being caused because the installation path is on a separate location to the game preferences. Your preferences data is on the main boot drive of the machine, but the game installation is on a separate drive.

We are working on an update for the game that will allow it to be launched from an external location - this should be ready in the next couple of days. If you wish to workaround the issue yourself, please delete the game from the separate drive by dragging the application to the Trash, then run the Steam client on your main boot drive and download the game to that drive. Once installed, launch the game from the installed location on the main boot volume.

Since my boot drive is a small SSD, I had installed the game on a separate drive to save space. Moving it to the boot drive fixed the crash.

Hopefully this helps anyone else who is running into the same problem.

(Note: As of almost two months later, the update they mentioned has not materialized)

Mine was crashing on startup as well, but wasn't related to being installed on an external volume. Resolved the issue by removing the ~/Library/Application Support/Feral Interactive. Lost all of my save data (you may be able to preserve it by pulling out the save files from that folder) - wasn't a big deal to me as I had just gotten started.

It did however, happen after I saved a different game to an external volume - not sure if it's related but sounds suspicious.