the most logical place to put data and files related to a game is in the same bloody place where the game is installed!
Immutable game data, yes.
but for configuration files/saves etc...
Games which save data to their install directoryWriting to "program files" typically requires admin priveliges, and a computer game should
not need admin priveliges. It is really annoying having to launch a compuer game as an admin because the developers were to lazy to folow Microsoft's recomendations. developers just dump their data all over the hard drive.
To be fair, this is a larger complaint against games coded for NT-based OS's (2000, xp 7 etc), where the programs really
should have properly written user data to the correct locations. Microsoft's own games were generally good at actually doing this correctly.
Games which outright refuse to launch based on a detected incompatability"This game cannot run on NT". Which may have been true back when Microsoft segregated their OS's between regular folk os (95, 98 etc) and business/server os (NT) and NT wasnt geared towards multimedia. But the game probably
can run on the modern incarnations of NT (Win7, 8 etc) and outright refusing to even try to run and self-terminating is really fustrating and seemingly pointless. Couldn't you have just warned me that it might not work and let me try anyway?
Some games also detect video memory, and nVidia Optimus seems to break this (returning some silly number like 17mb). So a 10 year old game refusing to run due to insufficient video memory on a video card with 3gb of vram is very fustrating.