Thank you for posting this work around. I was experiencing the same problem and couldn't start my sims 4 game.
I start my pc, start the EA app, my games are not available. There is a grey clock icon instead of a blue play butten. I restart the PC and everything is fine. But the next day I have the same problem again and need to restart a second time. Running the updater.exe from the installation files seems to have helped.
Edit: it seemed to have been a one time solution.
On my next try I had to restart my pc a second time to load the game, just like every time I wanted to play for the last two weeks or so.
Thank you so much, nothing better even after recovering EA app and restarting the app, but when I restarted my computer, everthing worked !! Wow !! Thank you !! ^^
Absolutly NO fix. YOU must restart your PC in order to work. Most patetic EA management, huge insult to the people that pay you. Error is for 2 years already, still no FIX. Not to mention the rest of it.
