***IT-savvy husband figured it out. The game was originally installed on OneDrive's Documents folder. After a recent hard disk wipe, it was reinstalled on C:\users\[username]\Documents. Steam and EA App were looking in the old OneDrive location to start the game. Something in the old location was broken and preventing the game from starting. Husband renamed the OneDrive Sims 4 folders to ModsOld and SavesOld to bypass them, and the game started.
I've rebooted, reinstalled, uninstalled, and reinstalled Sims 4. I click on Play in Steam. There are some "launching" messages, then "preparing game." The Sims 4 icon appears in the task bar. But it is only an error message that begins "Cannot start because game data is missing or damaged." I only reinstalled the game; there are no mods in it. How can I get the game to launch?
