Is there a difference? I usually just delete game folder and if I want to reinstall I do so without any issues. Any reason to run the installer rather than simply deleting the game folder?

Running the uninstaller would likely also clean up any entries made in the Windows registry, whereas deleting the folder likely would not.

If you only delete the game folder, there will be some leftovers in system registry and the game may be still visible as installed application. So, running uninstaller is a recommended way of getting rid of games you no longer want to play.

You'd also want to use an Uninstaller if you want to delete save games and preference files in the process. Sometimes, the saves are put in the game's own folder, but they're often in your documents folder, the Windows AppData folder, and things like that. Worse I've seen a small handful of programs save in multiple locations for different purposes. Spares you the trouble of tracking them down.

Luckily save files are usually tiny so there's no harm in keeping them.

But sometimes they're huge.

If you are playing games that use DOSbox or ScummVM, you can install them, take a copy of the game folder, and uninstall immediately.

After that, you can just copy and paste the game folder where you want.
Those games don't need any stuff from the OS really, so they should be 100% transferable to other places.

Uninstalling properly keeps the computer a bit "cleaner", but simply deleting the GOG installation deletes basically everything except for some shortcuts.


With some other games that rely heavily on the OS, it can be a different story. Using proper ways to install and uninstall them is highly recommended.

Far Cry 6: 2 GB savegames :)
Each file 200-300 MB

Same problem with Skyrim saves.

Why are they so big? Well because every little physics item has to be updated from when they are spawned, to where they are facing and moving, alive or dead, position of every joint and bone (I certainly hope it doesn't include moving foliage... saving every leaf or branch would quickly bloat up space), as well as potentially where in the script it last was executing and storage for every variable within those scripts. Along with absence of an item (because you picked it up, or it blew into another sector).

Honestly though, that's a sign of lazy programming.

During loading screens and playing back video sequences, or very low CPU usage it should have scheduled passes (maybe a pass is 1/10th of the save data) like a garbage collector, that check through the saved data, and marks for deletion items that are no longer relevant. 2-3 days within a game should be enough for an outpost to be discovered, cleaned up and new guards put in. Yes quests and items with permanent changes and quest items (lowering a bridge for example) should be static but useless stuff (knocked a candle over and it rolled under the table) should be removed. And areas you will never return to (like a flashback tutorial) should also be removed.

Reminds me of Diablo 2. The character save is a D2S file (50k at the upper limits probably), but people would likely copy all the generated map file data as well resulting in megabytes of bloat.

What makes you think that the GOG uninstaller deletes those?

In the case of Skyrim I think it's because Bethesda saves every (or almost every) placeable item that is present somewhere in the world. You left a piece of armore there, a belt here, both get saved.
(hopefully I don't confuse it with another RPG right now)

Far Cry? Don't know. All it needs are flags for the opened chests, the inventory and stash. It's a much simpler game. You can't change the surroundings significantly and permanently. Savegames in the game directory are a no go these days.
If you install into c:\ProgramFiles or another directory where admin rights are needed, then the game would have to run as admin in order to be able to save. Therefore a directory in the userprofile is standard.

Windows offers some "My saved games" directory, but hardly anyone uses it.

My documents directory is so full of savegames that I created a subdir for actual documents.

AppData\Roaming gets synchronized between different PCs if you have a network user
AppData\LocalLow is meant for programs that need special permissions, games should not use it.

AppData\Local\<company>\<productName> would be the ideal place to save.


It becomes annoying if games like The Witcher or The Sims install mods and DLCs into the userprofile to avoid needing admin rights for installing downloads (even if that would be the correct way: only the admin installs software). Discord even puts the executable in the appdata directory

Hmmm... Pretty sure it doesn't track an item unless it's changed states. At least that's how it managed it in the older Morrowind saves back when i was doing my own programs for modding.

See every object has an ID, which first is the File ID, and then an individual object ID. If you entered a building, and then left the building, only NPC's states would be saved, while non-changing objects wouldn't be tracked (which includes non-interactable objects like tables, fireplaces, lamps hanging from the ceiling, tunnels...etc) , but if you picked an item up, or had it fall on the ground, then it's something to track, or at least mention it's not there anymore.

So in skyrim, if you weren't having fun throwing a dragon's breath to see physics objects go all over the place, the filesize would remain considerably smaller. Actually in an editor if you just deleted whole quadrants from your save (Southern Vivec for example) it would just see it's not there and have a placeholder container for changes from the default. Items monsters and everything spawns anew.

In MS-DOS games (those using DOSBox) saved games are usually stored in "SAVE" or "SAVES" subdirectory in game folder, while Windows games mostly use "Documents" folder.

P.S. My saves backup folder is 3GB in size, so not all saves are small :)

It would be good if GOG supported some sort of portable instalation, and have option run it without adm n privilages.

Yes, although there are ways to at least extract files without installing. Whether the extracted files are in a playable state or not, depends on the game.

You can try Innoextract, which may or may not work:
https://constexpr.org/innoextract/


Assuming that extracting files is successful, and there are some third party source ports or something, it should be possible to install and play a good number of older games without properly installing them.
Trying that with Cyberpunk 2077 or something like that is another story obviously.