I bought Sims 3 on release day, had to install the thing 4 times to get it to work... and before you ask, yes my computer meets and exceeds the specs for the game. Anyway, for me to play the game, I have to go to the Sims 3 program files folder and click ts3.exe to play... the game launcher WILL NOT work for anything. Whenever I try to open it, it says "Sims3launcher has encountered a problem and needs to close"... it gives me no error code or anything. I've looked everywhere for an answer to this and obviously, EA was no help. Has anyone had this problem as well and found a fix for it? Please help me... I WANT MY LAUNCHER!!!

Why do you want a launcher? I was under the impression that launching from the exe was the sane way to do it?

Well, technically, the Sims 3 game launcher is how you are supposed to start the game... mine doesn't work. It allows the game to install custom content from the official Sims 3 site and makes it possible to extract my custom sims and houses and stuff... you know what I mean?

Moved to game help.. Please read the large green bolded announcement at the top of the help forums: "Hey, where should I post my question?"

You can install stuff just as easily without the launcher.

Why did you have to install four times? What went wrong? If you had installation issues, those are probably the cause.

Oh, my mistake, to be more specific, my girlfriend was the one who installed Sims 3 and she said installing was not a problem... the only reason she installed so many times was because after the installation was finished, the launcher would not start as stated above. She finally figured out that running the game from TS3.exe would run it. The main reason we want the launcher to work is for the free neighborhood offered by EA (Riverview) and for extracting custom sims, houses, and clothes from the game for upload... and from what I understand, you can't do that without the launcher... otherwise you end up extracting your entire neighborhood or something. Any information you can give would be EXTREMELY helpful... thank you in advance.

After you guys installed the game did you install the EADM by double clicking the exe? Without the EADM the launcher cannot download anything for the launcher to install and seeing there is no other way to download and install stuff into the game - you need both parts. It explains this in your installation guide.

The EA Download Manager... yeah, that's installed as well.