I'm trying to install a game I have on both Steam and GoG, but it's only ever defaulting to Steam in GoG galaxy, wheras in GoG I have the game plus the DLC (which I don't in Steam). No easy way to pick between the two, always pushing me to choose Steam, and I just can't seem to use GoG Galaxy to do what I want. So I'm doing what I did in 2014 and going to the website to download the game and install it that way which I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO DO when the company I bought the game from made their own goddamn client.

"become"?

I dunno, i believe it’s whole existence was a mistake from the start and gog should just ditched it altogether.

Some would say that GOG Galaxy was useless as of 2010.

So, as you can see from the previous comments and based on your choice of title, there are likeminded souls to be found on GoG.

Nonetheless, I do seem to remember from a past where the steam integration still functioned you could switch games you have on multiple accounts with a diamond shaped icon hovering somewhere on the top side of that screen. Alternatively, in your sidebar you should see all the stores specified under the tab 'games'.

Click the game in your Galaxy Library, click the diamond icon, and choose the platform there. Then click install.

It was useless years before it existed? I guess that could be true, if you count initial development time. :)

Galaxy cannot possibly be useless, given that it is the only possible way to have gameplay time tracking, and cloud saves, and Achievements, on GOG games.

And Galaxy is also the only good way to download the offline installers for GOG games, since the website download links are way too tedious & cumbersome & aggravating to bother with, and require way too many clicks, and they have a number mismatch on top of that (the file names as they are listed on the GOG website versus the file names that actually become downloaded when you save them), all of which makes using the GOG website to download offline installers a massive aggravation that is never worth doing.

Some GOG customers don't like those things I've described in the paragraphs above, but that still doesn't make Galaxy "useless." At most, it makes Galaxy "useless" to them.

But it's definitely not useless to all GOG customers, including the many who use those features, and who need Galaxy in order to use them.

I wish Galaxy were merely useless. But no, it is actively detrimental to DRM-free distribution of video games. That makes it much worse than useless.

It was useless before it was developed because the workplace culture at GOG somehow lead to it being developed; as vv221 implies.

"Only" is 1/3rd right. GOG achievements do need Galaxy. Other clients like Playnite can do time-tracking (not that there's any point using a client designed in 2015 to "keep track" of older games when it excludes 90% of the hundreds of hours you put in between 1990-2014...), whilst GameSave Manager can do cloud saves both "online" (saves in real-time) and offline (saves locally then mass syncs a copy later with a choice of cloud server DropBox, Google, OneDrive, etc). Cloud saves & 'stopwatches' have never really been a monopoly of store clients.

Galaxy 2.0 is a mess. I only use it for time tracking and downloading the offline installers for backup.

It takes a lot of customization to make it usable, and the moment you do a fresh install, it's all lost.

Some offline installers don't update to the latest version, and Support suggests you do a fresh install to fix that. I didn't wanna lose all the customization I did for it, so looked for another workaround. I had to mess around with Galaxy's database files to view and download the latest offline installers (still less clicks than doing it through the browser for huge games).

The Steam integration needs some workaround to function properly. You can find the solution online (I'm on the phone, so finding it and posting it is a struggle).

As for achievements, I remember doing a replay on Deus Ex: Human Revolution outside of Galaxy, cause I didn't want it to track time. Achievements did pop up the next time I logged on Galaxy outside the game.

If the offline installers ever go from GOG, so will Galaxy. I can do time tracking manually, thank you very much.

So, yeah, Galaxy... :/

I find Galaxy excellent for keeping track of my game library across services and game platforms. Being able to tag all of them for organization and tracking is wonderful.

I don't use it to launch games or download them however.

The client could use some love. Unofficial integrations can be unreliable, particularly Steam's.

I suspect GOG really hoped to keep growing and improving Galaxy when it first started in 2015, but the competition / market-share-grabbing / "We're now #2 to Steam" (something like that) of EGS really threw a curveball at them, so they tried the "All games in one place" angle with Galaxy 2, and since that didn't take off, they're just keeping it on life support for now.

And of course GOG doesn't have much money to experiment and play with, so overall they might be kinda "laying low" for now.