Don't forget when EA couldn't even spell their own name correctly, and made a folder named "Electrontic Arts".

Games do that by design so that they can be cleanly uninstalled without removing saved games and preferences. Also you should be able to backup your documents folder and not your programs folder and be safe. A good uninstaller should ask if you want to save them and remove them if you don’t.

I am not saying it is the best way. But I don’t think it is malicious or lazy.

There is literally a folder in every Windows profile (Vista onwards) called "Saved Games", it should all go there.

^ This. And the amazing thing is it's probably the least common place for games to put save data. I think I've played exactly one game that ever used it.

Most likely because the proper API to get the path to that folder was vista-or-later and games preferred to be backward compatible

Okay, but now nothing supports XP, so there's no excuse!

Multiple users too. Where would you store all that if not inside the user directory. But Saved Games is definitely a better location.

It’s probably because Windows makes the actual home folder somewhat difficult for the average non-technical user to see. They effectively made the My Documents folder the home folder for most of their userbase.

Which is why back when I did have a Windows partition, I always had a ~/MyDocs folder that worked as my actual "My Documents" folder.