Hello! I write this here because I hope I can spare others some suffering.
I used to get the Qt platform plugin error every single time I tried to start the app. Only after completely removing, then reinstalling the app it worked again.... until the next reboot. Then I was back to square one. Reinstalling directly or repairing the installation resulted in a "Ooops, something went wrong". So I had to nuke it from my system with third party tools. But I desperately looked for a better way.
What worked for me is this:
I checked the folder on the harddisk, in my case C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\EA Desktop.
Apparently EA's app sets the permissions really weird. The whole EA Desktop folder is owned by "System", and to even open it you need admin permission.
Funnily enough, there seemed to be quite a few folders named "Qt". Hence I assumed that permissions could be the problem, not the Qt plugins themselves. And I was right.
- What I did was to right-click on the Electronic Arts folder and go to "Properties"
- in the "Security" tab click on "Advanced" (the button on the bottom right)
- A new window will open. On the second line from the top it should say "Owner" and behind it there is a clickable link that says "Change". click it.
- Another window opens. For a dumb MS reason you can't just select a user group there, you have to write it out. So in the large blank text area type "users". This is country specific, so you need your local translation of "Users". Click on "check names" if in the textfield the computername and a \ are added before the "users" you have done it right
- click on OK.
- This brings you back to a slightly updated version of the previous window, where you have two checkboxes: one on top, underneath the new owner, one on the very bottom. Check both of them, so the changes are propagated through all of the subfolders and files in the Electronic Arts folder.
- click OK and close the properties.
And only after that the EA app worked. It seems that the App sets the permissions on its own folders so it can't access them any more after the initial installation.
@EA Shoving yet another useless publisher loader down our throats is one thing, but for f*ck's sake, let professionals program it next time! Or keep on making the game experience worse for your paying customers until the last one of them is fed up enough and goes pirating. You know, pirated games usually eliminate any and all trouble with unresponsive DRM servers, launchers that do nothing but crash and eat performance, and if you want to play a game you start the game and play, instead of having to spend an hour trying to fix your great loader first. You choice.
