Steam & EA App, game won't launch?
Ooh boy. Okay. First, lemme ask WHY THIS GOTTA HAPPEN WHEN I WANNA PLAY HORSIES? So bummed. ☹️ So I bought the Sims horses pack and tried to open it. I bought it on steam, where I'd bought other pa...
Forum Discussion
@Pepperbutt Your dxdiag shows a number of crashes of the Nvidia graphics driver. It would be odd for these to prevent Sims 4 from loading when installed through Steam but not through the EA App. However, the errors are real and should be addressed. So please do a clean uninstall and reinstall of the Nvidia driver, as described here:
Use the newest driver provided by MSI rather than the newest one from Nvidia. You can always update later if you want, but with dual-graphics laptops, the manufacturer-provided driver is often tweaked to work with the specific models and may work better than the generic Nvidia driver. You can find the MSI driver here, after selecting Graphics from the dropdown menu:
https://www.msi.com/Laptop/Katana-GF76-11UX/support?sub_product=Katana-GF76-11UD#driver
Restart your computer after installing the driver and before trying to play.
If that doesn't help, please try playing in a new admin Windows account. Make it local, as in, don't link it to your Microsoft account. You'll be able to (try to) launch Sims 4 without reinstalling anything.
I'm not confident the new account will help though—this sounds very much like an issue with the Steam entitlement. But a new account isn't going to break anything. If it doesn't help, the next question I have is whether you've ever subscribed to EA Play through either the EA App or Steam. A blocked EA Play-related entitlement from Steam could explain the problem. Let me know either way.
@puzzlezaddict I'll do that in the morning (middle of the night AT), but no I've never subbed for that. I never used the EA app before this.
We'd just updated the graphics card from the Nvidia website, surprised it's throwing issues but we'll do it! Thank you!
I'm guessing there's no real fix for steam entitlement other than for EA to patch something down the line hopefully?
We'd just updated the graphics card from the Nvidia website, surprised it's throwing issues but we'll do it! Thank you!
I'm guessing there's no real fix for steam entitlement other than for EA to patch something down the line hopefully?
@Pepperbutt Just to be clear, it may not be sufficient to simply update the Nvidia driver. The clean uninstall and reinstall is the only guarantee that a driver-related issue has been addressed. I'm not sure from your post whether you know and already did that or just tried to update, but if the latter, please do a clean uninstall to be thorough.
If that and the new Windows account didn't help, the entitlement issue might be fixable by removing Sims 4 from your Steam account and adding it back, or by unlinking and relinking your Steam and EA accounts. I know it's possible to remove the base game from Steam when someone owns only the base game, but I haven't heard if it works when the player owns packs as well. And unlinking and relinking can have consequences for other games (possibly lost progress), plus once it's done the first time, there's a six month lockout before it can be done again. So I thought it would be better to try everything else first.
If you do want to unlink and relink, remove Sims 4 from Steam and add it back while the accounts are unlinked, and clear the EA App's cache again as well.
https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/faq/clear-cache-to-fix-problems-with-your-games/
If none of this helps, let me know, and I'll ask someone from EA to look over this thread.
- @puzzlezaddict You know what.. I have no idea what happened, but it works now. Maybe the latest patch fixed it. I don't know. I'd given up because nothing worked, I said screw it and tried to open it this morning.. it worked! Thank you so much for all your help, I really appreciate it. <3 I don't know what end the issue was, I don't know if what we did helped, but it's working now so?
@Pepperbutt EA has been trying to address some entitlement issues with Sims 4 (and Sims 3, and probably other games), and there was an update a few days ago that was supposed to be progress if not a definitive fix for everyone. So perhaps your account was one of those helped. Or... who knows, sometimes these things just happen. It's not magic, of course, but an update to Windows or a driver or another app might fix a problem we didn't manage to address during troubleshooting. Sometimes it's impossible to say.
At any rate, the important thing is that you can play now.
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