This is good for now as an alternative, but if the plan is to eventually rule out the "classic" (that name is what scares me) installers, then this is very very bad news.

Why would you get the feeling this is what's planned? Unless you think this has been the plan all along. But basically, what this does is eliminate the two installer versions. There are no longer any installers that include Galaxy. Basically, they're all 'classic' installers. You now obtain Galaxy via web interface if you don't have it installed, and Galaxy fetches the 'classic' installer when you initiate the install through Galaxy. Seems to me that's the opposite of what they'd do if they plan on phasing out 'classic' installers.

Hoo-fuckin-ray.

Color me shocked.

The "optional" client takes one more inexorable step towards being mandatory.

They are unchanged.
You do not have to re-download them,

If there was actually a Galaxy client available for Linux, and if it did incremental updates, as opposed to re-downloading the whole game, I could see myself using Galaxy for that.

How do you reach this conclusion from the announcement?

Maybe you should have tried to at least read the post in its totality....

Is there a way to turn off this huge "Download and Install Now" Galaxy button in the game shelf? A lot of GOG users don't want to use Galaxy.

Adblock works.

The fact that we now have a Galaxy button on every single GOG game in our shelf is very disconcerting. Many are worried that Galaxy is going to be made mandatory some day. Look at the current state of the installers: first they were just called installers, then "classic" installers, now they're called "offline backup game installers." As if they were extraneous in some way.

GOG needs to understand that many do not want to use Galaxy to run their games at all. A mandatory, always-online client is considered DRM and we don't want to see this on GOG.

IF you want to get proper offline installers, yes. (You can also download these via some sort of submenu in your Galaxy library; I'm not sure if doing it this way downloads all the parts simultaneously, or if you still have to click on each one.)

One reason they split them up is so that, if one file gets corrupted during downloading, you won't have to download the entire game again (some games these days have downloads of more than 30 gigs), only the affected "chunk".

I see, thanks. Will stick to Galaxy, it's not so bad in the end

There has been a "Try GOG Galaxy" button on every game card in the library for years. This just puts it to a more direct purpose (and, unfortunately, makes it much larger).

Big improvement. Thanks.

You can download offline backup installers via Galaxy too. Doing it that way will download the entire thing in a single click. Go to MORE -> Backup & Goodies.