Sims 4 only launches once, after reinstall

@maggie9412 Had an issue with starting the game lately, too. When trying to launch the game the EA App would pop up, than close and pop up again, without the game launching at all. First thing I did was to run "repair" - no changes after that. Restarting the EA App didn't change anything either. Instead of reinstalling the game I went with restarting the computer - what did work but back in the game then there were other issues (Households not loading, game stuck in loading, preview pictures not generating when trying to save a build) even after having moved the whole mod folder to a new location AND also deactivating custom content the issues remained. In the current version the game is not very enjoyable.

@maggie9412 and @N_Sieben  The game launching once after a reinstall, but never again, suggests a problem with an antivirus.  Repairing helps some of the time, but the long-term fix would be to set exceptions in the antivirus for TS4_x64.exe and EADesktop.exe.  If you only use Windows Defender, and Controlled Folder Access is active, set the same exceptions.  You may need to repair or even reinstall afterwards, but hopefully just the once.

@N_Sieben  The other issues you're seeing could also be explained by an overly aggressive antivirus.  So please try the above and let me know what issues, if any, remain.

@puzzlezaddict The only thing that has changed lately is The Sims 4 and the EA App (an even bigger pain in the * than Origin before), my AV solution did not change nor did any hardware in the used PC and it is a very bad advice to tell people to jeopardize system security by adding exceptions to the AV solution. This is equally stupid as telling people - in a different context - to deactivate core isolation because a certain anti-cheating software is no longer working. Such "solutions" only support companies in their stinginess/laziness. This is also true for EA. EA is a multi-billion-dollar company that should have the resources to avoid badly optimized and untested (probably for profit reasons) software in the first place. Especially when making major changes to parts of a game - like the one to the Gallery lately. Apart from this I am not looking for a half-baked, generic solution here. You can find those in dozens if not uncounted threads like this. It's always the same and quite often do not solve the problem at all but waste the time of people really looking for help - something I did not intend to do with my addition to this thread. It was to push the thread. Apart from that - having several thousand hours of playtime in this game - by my experience problems like this get solved by future patches. They just have to be reported and enough attention has to be generated.

@N_Sieben 

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@N_Sieben wrote:
@puzzlezaddict The only thing that has changed lately is The Sims 4 and the EA App (an even bigger pain in the * than Origin before), my AV solution did not change nor did any hardware in the used PC and it is a very bad advice to tell people to jeopardize system security by adding exceptions to the AV solution.

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This is only a security risk if you think the .exe in question is a security risk.  If you trust that EA products are not themselves malware and do not allow malware to piggy-back on their software, setting the exceptions doesn't elevate your risk at all relative to the general background risk of operating a computer.

For the rest, it doesn't matter what players think.  EA has decided to create the App as it currently stands and that all EA games will require it to run.  You can protest about the App's behavior all you want, but judging from the protests going back almost three years now, it's all falling on deaf ears.  Read the EA App forums if you're curious.

The bottom line is, if you want to play Sims 4 right now, you're stuck with the EA App as it exists, not as you or anyone else would like it to be.