The Sims 4 Legacy Edition – no longer available from 12.12.22

EA have today announced that from the 12 December, the Legacy Edition of the Sims 4 will no longer be available to download. If you want to download the Sims 4 and have a non-Metal Mac, you won’t be able to. Your only option will be to purchase a Metal supported Mac to play the current version of the game on.

Metal info – https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT205073

Legacy Edition FAQ at Answers HQ – https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-Mac/The-Sims-4-Mac-Legacy-Edition-thread/m-p/8420037

Note – the current EA announcement does not correctly explain what the Metal requirements are for Mac. For clarification, a Mac needs a Metal supported graphics card/chip AND to be running macOS 10.11.6 El Capitan or later. It is not enough to just update the operating system. Hopefully this will be corrected at some point on their website.

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Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle is not compatible with the Legacy Edition

In news that should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, The Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle Expansion Pack which is due to be released on the 5 June is not available for Mac users running the Legacy Edition. If you are running the Legacy Edition save yourself the money and grief and don’t pre-order it or buy it when it is released. Nothing you do will make it work on your machine. There is no fix or workaround. If bundles are available and they include Eco Lifestyle, you will not be able to run it. The system requirements are very clear on the Origin site and state that a Metal supported Mac is required. For those still living under a rock, Legacy Edition is for Mac users whose Macs do not support Metal.

OS: Metal required. Mac OS® X 10.11 (El Capitan)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz Processor or better
RAM: At least 4 GB RAM
HARD DRIVE: At least 15 GB of free space with at least 1 GB additional space for custom content and saved games
VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680, AMD Radeon RX 560 or better
INPUT: Keyboard and Mouse
ONLINE REQUIREMENTS: Internet connection required for product activation.

The Sims 4 – ‘Initialization error at start up’ [135dec40:90f690cf:00000075:495f32a0]

Update 07/04/20 – this issue has appeared again with patch 1.62.67.1020 but for the current version of the game, not the Legacy Edition. The workaround to fix it is in the Answers HQ thread on the issue here.


Update 25/11/19 – this issue has now been fixed in the Mac Legacy Edition patch 1.58.69.1610


Mac users running High Sierra on non-Metal supported Macs are reporting that the Legacy Edition of Sims 4 will not load successfully:

Unable to start:

Initialization error at start up.

[135dec40:90f690cf:00000075:495f32a0]

If you are getting this error there are two workarounds you can try.

Option 1:
In Origin right click/CTRL click on the Sims 4 in your Games Library, select Game Properties then Advanced Launch Options and choose English from the drop down menu:

After you have successfully loaded the game in English you should be able to switch back to your native language.

Option 2:

  1. Right click on the Sims 4 in your Applications folder and select Show Package Contents. You should now see three folders and one file in the Finder window:
  2. Click on the installer.plist file once to select it, go to Edit > Copy (or CMD and C).
  3. Open the Contents folder then the Resources folder.
  4. Right click on The Sims 4 app in the Resources folder (the one with the game icon)  and select Show Package Contents again. There should just be one folder in the Finder window called Contents.
  5. Go to Edit > Paste (or CMD and V) to paste the installer.plist file you just copied into this folder. It should look like this:
  6. You should now have the installer.plist file in two locations.

Either of these workarounds should result in a game that successfully launches. Hopefully EA will release a fix soon but in the meantime this should get you back in your game.