With nostalgia, I remember those simple times where savegame files were stored inside the game's own folder, so that they were easily accessible for backup or hex editing purposes. Modern games place their save data in folders with the longest filepaths! It's either:

1) under My Documents\[publisher name], which is difficult to find because I don't care for the publisher, though I always remember the developer; or
2) somewhere under User\(...)\Application Data\[several more folders]\Publisher\[folder placed there presumably just to troll me]\Savegames.

This practice irritates me for two reasons. Firstly, I like to back up my save data to my flash disk or web location often to avoid losing everything due to my increasingly older hard disk, and the long path it makes it very difficult to track them down manually. If it weren't for the %appdata% command, I wouldn't be able to find the "User" folder due to there being several folders on my disk with a similar name, with their contents being hidden for some strange reason. Secondly, those locations are all on my C: drive, and the way I organised my hard disk, C: is the smallest partition, and is used by the system. And some of those savegame files are rather bulky, some proliferate like rabbits (The Witcher 2), and many of them clutter up the My Documents folder, which I'd like to be as neat as possible for obvious reasons.

I understand this has something to do with the Windows restrictions on file access/writings, so that the system files are not compromised. But are there options to set a "free-for-writing" attribute to particular folders or entire drives? I really need a clean-up tool for all those savegames scattered all over my C: drive! Why can't Windows be customised to allow the writing of savegame files to custom locations?

You should see the mess in Linux. Games can save in the home folder, in the configuration folder, in the unity folder inside the configuration folder, in the local/share folder... It isn't a platform problem, each developer (or the game design software they use) has different ideas of where a game should keep saved games and/or configuration. Sometimes they keep configuration, saved games, and logs ALL IN DIFFERENT FOLDERS!

I also miss the old DOS games which would ONLY SAVE WITHIN THEIR OWN DIRECTORY. Awesome days. :)

Oh boy, the frustration with save files. It's like trying to undertake the quest for the Holy Grail in your attempt to find them all. Still, if you want obscure save folders, go no further than the first Alien Shooter, whose save file isn't actually a file at all, but a freaking registry entry! No, I'm not making this up.

Wow, that's a new one on me. I can only assume the Alien Shooter devs suffered from temporary insanity while making that game.

It's more frequent than you would think. For instance, a lot of Telltale games keep savegame "variables" in the windows registry. For example, which pseudonym you choose for Marty McFly in the first Back to the Future: The Game episode carries over to the next episodes via a registry key.

AFAIK it's the same for the Neverhood.

Oh, that's still pretty harmless. I know the games that take the cake when it comes to braindead game saves:

The Yu Gi Oh!: Power of Chaos trilogy for Windows. These games save the game state in the game directory and encrypt it with a random key that was written to the registry at installation.

So you have to back up the files as well as the registry key. If the key doesn't match your saved game will be automatically reset.

Figuring that out was fun!

Are those developers trying to one-up each other in making the save locations as braindead as possible?

Casual gamers probably never do anything with their save files outside the in-game save/load feature, but that's still no excuse for the developers to dump them in some folder that requires some Google-aided research to find. I've been backing up my saves for longer games ever since I lost 30+ hours of Skyrim gameplay in a hard drive crash.

The savegame system in games is generally poor and outdated. I'm surprised no developer has come up with a quick back-up feature for saved games.

I think it is the way to go, with less junk sub-directories.
Would every game do the same, you could backup the saves of all your games in one go, just by copying the "Application Data" folder.

I go with something similar with my home-made Linux packages: everything is saved under $HOME/.local/share/games/game-name/
When I want to transfer savegames to another computer, I just have to backup the folder $HOME/.local/share/games and the saves (and settings, custom maps, whatever…) of every single game come together, without me having to track them down one by one.

I’d say the "Application Data" way is a good way, but its actual implementation is yet too messy to make it easy to use (from memories, I didn’t actually used Windows for years).

Yeah, I also preferred the DOS way of doing things. Maybe it is archaic, but it is simple and you know where to look.

I presume Microsoft have had some genuinely good idea of where all the save games should be, which would allow each Windows users to have their own separate save games for all their games. But then they should have enforced it somehow to developers because nowadays it seems just messy and a jungle to hunt down save games for different games. Apparently they never thought anyone would want to find their save games manually, or feel that they shouldn't even try to. Well, guess again, and give the users back the control.

I hate it when OSes or applications think they know better than you what you want, and think that the less you know about the innards (e.g. the file system and directory locations), the better. This goes way back to e.g. those Windows Explorer features where accidentally dragging a file or a directory on top of another directory instantly moves it there (where what you originally wanted to do was to just double click that object, but the mouse moved a bit at the same time); or the super-annoying Windows 7 feature where it e.g. makes the window fill the whole screen when I merely tried to move it towards the edge of the screen; and stupid shit like that).

My personal beef was with Minecraft, where it saved created worlds. I don't play that game myself, but I've helped one kid (for which I bought the game) to move the save games from one PC to another a couple of times.

I've many times had to google where the heck they are hidden, and then I noticed that on two different Windows 7 PCs, Minecraft saved them to a bit different places (in one it was under some "/blaa/blaa/blaa/blaa/Roaming/" directory, and on the other it wasn't), and I also recall for some reason they were at least on one system with hidden status. Why was Minecraft trying to make it so hard to locate the save games?

I know what you mean but... developing a game for a platform doesn't really mean you have any real knowledge of that platform. :)

I know and I do understand that (especially for indies) but you have all these big game companies spending billions on game development and they couldn't afford one person to advise them about OS specific issues? It just bugs me.

I suppose you could partly blame Microsoft for not getting the message out better but at the end of the day they can't force people to listen to them.

In my own experience AAA companies like EA etc are usually the worst because they care little about the actual customer. They'd rather just have the money.
Anyway, I've lost so many saved games over the ages that I actually stopped looking for them. I play the game and hope I get everything done before my next format or OS upgrade or whatever.