It takes two with friends pass doesn't work

I bought this game via steam. I installed it onto two computers using steam, then tried to use EA friends pass to invite from my EA account to my wife's account.

The error we see is something like, "an error on our end caused your launch to fail".

Ive tried running as administrator, running app recovery, disabling startup processes, rebooting.

Things that may be odd:

- when logging in to EA desktop using Google oauth, it seems to work but the browser page shows an error page

- i installed the app via steam to the D drive, instead of installing with EA using friends pass