Reinstalling Win7 without reinstalling Steam games?

[Elixer]

The problem is not with steam per se, it is with all the different ways a game saves the data.

The worst one is LIVE based games (Batman, DOW-II, and so on), if you created a 'offline' profile, then it is very difficult to transfer said profile to the new install.

Stupid DRM on doing savegames. Brilliant move.

The reason MS uses 'my documents' is because we are in a multi-user world, and they figured that was the best way to handle it.

Personally, I like my savegames in the same directory as the game.

 

[BFG10K]

Personally, I like my savegames in the same directory as the game.

Me too, a /save folder (or equivalent) is far better. It's so much easier dealing with DOS-style installations where everything the game needs is contained inside its own folder.

Modern games dump crap everywhere, and LIVE just adds more bloat. I can’t believe someone actually thought storing saved games online was a smart idea. :thumbsdown:

 

[Dankk]

As someone who reformats and builds new computers fairly often, I've done several Steam transplants, all 100% successfully. It's really not difficult.

As posted above, it's just a matter of backing up your /Steam/steamapps folder somewhere, and then figuring out where the save files are (usually in My Documents). In this case it's probably easiest to just back up your entire My Documents folder, unless you're one of those people who saves everything in there and it's extremely messy... but 99% of your gamesaves will be somwhere in that directory.

Just saying is all. There's a lot of people in this thread making it appear to be more complicated than it really is, as well as others who say it can't be done for some reason (?).