Downloaded the Sims 4 demo. Installed, hit play, After Splash screen, video of demo the screen goes black and the Circle of endless wait is at the mouse cursor. I let this sit for over 10 minutes with no progress. Unacceptable.
Now before the flame wars post about what machine i am running and it must be my slow internet connection because of the genius trolls that exist on forums.

Asus Maximus Formula IV
Intel I7 [email protected]
240g SSD
Asus GTX 760 with 340.52 driver
Windows 8.1

Comcast business line

There is no way any game should take seven plus minutes to load, Windows loads in 15 seconds on this machine. Can they honestly justify coding should take longer to launch a product than the operating system? I have been enjoying the Sims over every rendition since 1.0 and Enjoyed Maxis when it came on floppies in Dos environment. I think it loaded faster then too.

Is Origin actively running when this happens?

Yes, Any time you start an EA game Origin starts in the background, Skynet must watch

Very odd. It actually runs fine on my $200 tablet and craptastic 768k DSL, so definitely not a system requirements issue.

I've seen this happen when the Origin process is killed/not running before the demo loads (experimented with trying to get it to run without the spyware known as Origin, lol). Have you let Origin update itself to the newest version, and same with the demo?
If that doesn't work, all I can think of is uninstall Origin and the demo completely and reinstall. Can't imagine how that would fix it, but I've had that fix things before.

I am glad you posted about this magistare. I am absolutely disgusted by this. I was able to run Sims 4 CAS demo once. It ran just fine once. Since then, every time I try to load it, it will not progress past the black screen.

My computer specs (way above average):
Windows 7 Home Premium Service Pack 1
AMD Athlon (tm) II X 4 645 Processor 3.10 GHz
10 GB RAM
64 bit operating system
ATI Radeon Sapphire HD 5770 1 GB GDDR5 graphic card

This and this alone will likely make me never want to purchase this game ever.

I was actually enjoying creating Sims in this, aside from the lack of CaSt, I was able to make very different looking Sims, and I was looking forward to making more Sims, but I cannot because the demo won't get past the black screen that appears after the loading screens. It just sits there with a mouse cursor in the middle of it and does nothing. I have no hopes that the actual game can be any good after having this happen.

My Origin was loaded, fully updated and all.

Have there been any other people who've had this problem? Has anyone found a solution to it yet? I must admit, that if I have to have workarounds to make Sims 4 work, like I did with Sims 3, it is not worth buying it. I had to fight and fight to get Sims 3 to run on my older computer. Even on my new computer, I have to go in and individually set each EP exe to run at over 2 GBs RAM or I cannot run a custom made world for very long at all without it crashing. I don't want another game that I have to jump through hoops and over mountains and under chairs and run through the woods and swim the rivers and lakes just to make it run on a decent computer.

Any and all assistance with this problem will be greatly appreciated.

I hope it's okay to mention it since the demo is free, but as a last ditch effort when all else has failed, maybe try the cracked TS4CAS.exe from the 3DM download? You should be able to download just the exe file. It needs Origin to be installed, but I don't think it uses it so that may get past this issue.