When Helldivers 2 first launched on PC, its installation size was a whopping 154GG. It is now, thanks to the magic of Going Back And Taking A Look At Things, a measly 23GB. Please, God, let this be the one good trend in video games for 2026.
Developer Arrowhead first announced plans to shrink the PC version's size down last month, saying that 154GB figure was "roughly three times larger than the same game installed on consoles!" The reason given for this was that the team wanted to support older mechanical hard drives found on older PCs (all modern consoles have solid state drives), and so in order to give players with those HDDs a playable experience, they "duplicated" a bunch of assets like textures and sound effects, so that a mechanical hard drive didn't need to go reaching all over its surface area just to respond to what was happening at speed on the screen.
Which sounds wonderful in theory, but months of analytics post-release have revealed that not only are a small number of Helldivers 2 players actually using a mechanical HDD--around 11%--but that the pre-release industry standard figures Arrowhead used to make the decision to accommodate them in the first place were off.
They've found that it's the generation of levels causing the biggest slowdown, not the constant loading of assets, and that their projections for how slow HDD users were going to find things were also "very conservative". So a new "slim" version of the game is now being tested in a public beta (which you can join here), clocking in at just 23GB, and this version--optimised for everyone--will only "result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most".
I'm fascinated by this. We live in an age where video game studios and publishers obsess over metrics, yet these numbers were so wrong! And in fixing them, a major video game is going to free up so much precious space–something that could get very expensive soon--that I can install at least 13 indie city-builders where those 131GB used to be!
