You know what annoys me the most about it?
Later this year, or early next year, I might buy a new computer because my current one is showing its age (CPU and mainboard are 12 years old by now!) and I've had occasional freeze-ups for some hardware reason.
I have multiple hard drives and SSDs, and would like to move most of them (all except the system drive) to the new PC.
All my games are installed on non-system drives. With the way Steam works, I will easily be able to just move my game drive to another PC, install Steam on that PC, and point its library folder to the one that contains my Steam library.
The installed games will likely work as they are, simple and easy.
But you know what will be missing?
Most of my fucking save games (unless the games use Steam cloud saves) because they're not in the install folder. They're in the "My Files" folder on C.
If you use multiple drives or even just partitions on a single drive, this tendency of modern games to shove all your saves into a system folder is complete bullshit.
Not just somewhere on C, but a
system folder.
If you reinstall your Windows, it's gonna get wiped.
The whole point of installing games on different drives is that they won't get wiped if you reinstall your system.
Or that you can just port the entire drive to a new computer if you buy a new rig.
I've been using multiple hard drives for 20 years now. Never installed a game on C in all that time, yet most games insist on dumping their saves in the My Files folder!
I haven't reinstalled my Windows in a long time, but I used to do it more regularly in the past, and I lost a bunch of savegames in the process because I had naively assumed they'd be in the game folder. They weren't. They were in the fucking system partition I just formatted.
Absolute bullshit.
And then there's games that don't just do it to save files, but stuff like ini files too!