Some time ago I purchased the complete collection of Sims 3 on Steam, It's awesome... except for this one little thing.

So to start the game I start up Steam. When I hit play, this launches the Original Sims 3 launcher, and from there I start the game as usual. However, I have never been able to play for much longer than an hour or two, because the Game window will randomly crash and disappear. Steam However always shows that the game is still running on its end, even though I can't get the launcher or window I was playing in. To restart, I have to force Steam to stop the game. I get a little Sims 3 popup that says "Warning: Game is still running, any unsaved data will be lost" and I click through to end it anyway.

Clearly, there is some miscommunication between the Steam launcher and my Sims game, because the game crashes, but Steam says everything is fine and I'm still playing the game. Virtual Gaslighting aside, how do I:

A) Ensure my game stays up long enough for me to play it, and
B) Make it so that if the Sims 3 DOES crash again, I don't have to go through this whole Steam rigamarole?

Unless you have a specific need for the Launcher, you can start up the Steam version of TS3 without the Steam client even running. Shortcut to the TS3W.exe file in the directory below and you can use that to start up the game directly to the world/game save selection screen.

...\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\The Sims3\Game\Bin\TS3W.exe (make sure it's the one with the "W" and not just TS3.exe).

That may not really stop your game from freezing up or crashing, if that is what's happening, for some other reason. But the bypass at least removes the overhead of both the Steam client and the 1.67 Launcher from the equation and is one of the reasons many of us switched over to Steam from the downright annoyances of an Origin install.