As many of You here, I'm putting a lot of time and effort into the games I'm buying. I'm always trying to 100% them, both games and their achievements. With so much time and care and (sometimes) frustration put into them, one would like to preserve those experiences for years to come. Every now and then I run one of the games I maxed out to experience it once more for a couple of minutes. To see what I've achieved, to experience amazing visuals, to play again that favourite level.

So what's the problem, right? Just copy the game files onto a pendrive or cloud or whatever and enjoy Your damn games for the rest of your life. Well, it's not that easy.

For some of my games, their save states are located in My Documents/My Games,
For some of my games, their save states are located in AppData/Roaming,
For some of my games, their save states are located in AppData/LocalLow,
For some of my games, their save states are located in wherever I have actually installed them,
For some of my games, their save states are located in who knows where else, because I don't.

One would think that Galaxy might be an answer to this problem, but unfortunately it does not extend to most of the games.

So I have questions:

To GOG overlords: Why not implement an easy way to install the games You are selling, so that the copies of save states (along with completed achievements) will be stored wherever the game has been actually installed? That way making backups will be easy and quick.

To GOG community: Maybe we should start a thread which will help locating save states for Your games and their achievements?

Galaxy will be the answer to this problem... it just won't happen overnight. GOG has made a cloud feature called "universal cloud saves". This will allow GOG to map the save location for nearly every game GOG sells.

It however, will take time... I imagine eventually most (if not all) of GOG's catalog will suppot cloud saves.

So you backup all your games to a separate backup system correct? I extract this information from the want to keep things into the future. If so it should be a simple task to create a folder structure and documentation appropriate to the task, for instance an example could be subfolders such as mods, saves, docs. Within saves a text file with save locations. This is not in any way difficult, in 99% of recent days saves will go to game install location, document, %appdata%. In the rare instance where this is not the case a simple google search will generally help.
So this is a non-point, if you can't be bothered to do a simple thing like that buy a console, far easier to maintain.

I've already did what You said for the games I could.
However, not every obscure game can be found that way and google doesn't know the answer to every one of them.
And it's not as rare instance as You might think.
All I'm saying is that the data should be additionally stored within the main installation destination to have an easy to access, secure copy of the save states.

That's not a simple take though. The store has games from decades back, in different operating systems, requirements, programming teams long since gone. More modern games might have requirement from steam builds or uplay builds or other client/dependanct requirements. So you are never going to get a single concise place to find saves. I agree, it would be useful to have save path and settings path provided as part of the information on a game, this they should be able to do. Maybe that's one for the wish list, I.e. Provide an install itinerary and locations per game?

Out of curiosity, what satisfaction do you get out of doing 100% of achievements? I always see it as spending time for a matter of pride, almost like trying to beat a game that you don't really like just because it's a challenge.

I don't really do every single achievement. Not the ones I don't want to be doing.

I always try to do the ones that can be gotten in a single playthrough of a game. That way I'm getting the story, visuals, gameplay and some form of accomplishment for doing some achievements.

I hate all sorts of timing achievements: 'Complete the game in under 1 hour 30 minutes' sort of thing. I think that they take away a lot from enjoyment of the game.

Also the kind of achievements which require You to beat the game multiple times: 'Finish New Game +'. I mean, that's just dumb.

Already been suggested a couple of times. One of the threads on the topic:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/help_gog_galaxy_find_the_save_files_of_our_favourite_games

We probably could just add the information to the GoGwiki though. Would have to take into account each and every OS though.

PCGamingWiki and Save Game Locations Wiki are good places to start looking for that info.

Didn't know about the latter (though I won't be bookmarking it because of its Windows-centricity), and while the former is a pretty nice resource, it's quite lacking with respect to not-so-well-known titles, as the OP mentioned in post#4.

Slightly off-topic: isn't there a file location standard for Windows? Not that it helps much to have one though, as most devs don't give a shit about the XDG specification for Unix-like systems...

They make it easier than GFWL did. I remember having an offline profile in that and losing my saved games when I upgraded to a new PC. Not because I didn't copy the saves, but because I didn't copy the GFWL master configuration file. Clearly some muppet thought that linking saves to a single user profile was a good idea. Goodbye 4 seasons progress in F1 2010...

Don't know about that, but besides the locations mentioned in the OP, in rare occasions saves can be found in \Users\Public\ , \Users\All Users\ or even registry.