Many games offer when instaling to choose where you want to have your saves etc. stored...
Interesting, I haven't encountered that before.
In any case, Cogmind doesn't have an installer (I hate them myself, but I should provide the option eventually when the potential audience grows).
There is one drawback when you store your files in the installation folder: if there are two people playing the game on the same pc, they need to have separate copies of the game... Considered the size of the game this isn't too much of an issue though 
Haha, that is true, and another way to look at the benefit of user-relative data storage, which is why MS does it... but it's annoying for those who prefer having everything in one convenient place and not have to go find some differently named directory (or subdir, or subsubdir...) over in %appdata%.
As a workaround for the game being installed in the program files folder:
icacls "C:\Program Files\COGMIND" /grant %USERNAME%:(CI)(OI)F
This grants all full access to the current user. Needs to be executed with admin privileges: press Win+X -> Command prompt (admin).
(I think this issue should be gone when you release on Steam - some of my Steam games also seem to store their savegames locally)
I'm not too familiar with Steam, but I imaging it does handle local saving just fine since games are run under Steam's own privileges.
