winjer
Member
This past week, Portugal experienced several major forest fires across the entire country. The situation became so severe that it created a massive smoke cloud visible from space.
I live in one of the affected areas, with raging fires all around.
During the night of the 17th to the 18th, two fires burned the forested area around my village, one coming within 1 km and the other less than 200 m from my house.
Several houses were directly threatened by the fires, and the police had to evacuate many people from their homes.
This meant that electricity and internet infrastructure were destroyed. Fortunately, the power company managed to fix this very quickly, so we only had one day without electricity.
We are still without internet, landline, and TV services. My ISP has been working to restore the infrastructure for the past week, and we expect it to be up and running soon.
This is why I haven’t been participating much in this forum.
I had Steam, the EA app, and GOG installed. Both Steam and GOG allowed me to play in offline mode.
Because of that, I was still able to play some of the games I had installed, such as Cyberpunk 2077, Dark Souls 3, Elden Ring, Civilization VI, Braid, and a couple more.
However, the EA app refused to work, so I was unable to play any games there, even single-player ones. This really sucks and was a stark reminder of how “always online” games are a terrible thing for consumers.
This is also why cable and streaming services can be a terrible option for consumers, as they remove the convenience of always being available that physical media has.
A massive fire might be an exceptional event, but it’s still a reminder that when things go wrong, we lose access to all the media we own, be it games, movies, TV, music, etc.
But a fire is just one way these services can go away, so our access to our media is never safe.
I live in one of the affected areas, with raging fires all around.
During the night of the 17th to the 18th, two fires burned the forested area around my village, one coming within 1 km and the other less than 200 m from my house.
Several houses were directly threatened by the fires, and the police had to evacuate many people from their homes.
This meant that electricity and internet infrastructure were destroyed. Fortunately, the power company managed to fix this very quickly, so we only had one day without electricity.
We are still without internet, landline, and TV services. My ISP has been working to restore the infrastructure for the past week, and we expect it to be up and running soon.
This is why I haven’t been participating much in this forum.
I had Steam, the EA app, and GOG installed. Both Steam and GOG allowed me to play in offline mode.
Because of that, I was still able to play some of the games I had installed, such as Cyberpunk 2077, Dark Souls 3, Elden Ring, Civilization VI, Braid, and a couple more.
However, the EA app refused to work, so I was unable to play any games there, even single-player ones. This really sucks and was a stark reminder of how “always online” games are a terrible thing for consumers.
This is also why cable and streaming services can be a terrible option for consumers, as they remove the convenience of always being available that physical media has.
A massive fire might be an exceptional event, but it’s still a reminder that when things go wrong, we lose access to all the media we own, be it games, movies, TV, music, etc.
But a fire is just one way these services can go away, so our access to our media is never safe.
