As the publisher, EA should be ashamed of releasing code with this crash on launch, literally game-stopper bug. They need to step up and fix this. This The Sims 4 has never successfully executed on this computer at all. It just won’t open. It just won’t launch.
EDIT: The December 2014 update of to appears to have fixed the problem, allowing it to run on my existing Windows 8.1 PC, I am very pleased.