Helldivers 2 PC Install Size Cut by More Than 80%

Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios will reduce the PC version’s install size from around 154 GB to roughly 23 GB, which is over an 80% size cut. The announcement was posted on the game’s official Steam page, where deputy technical director, Brendan Armstrong, said tests show that loading times for players using mechanical hard disk drives increase only slightly after the reduction.

Armstrong previously explained in Oct. 2025 that the PC build required nearly three times as much storage as the console versions. The team duplicated frequently used assets such as textures and sound effects to support players who still use a Hard Disk Drive (HDD). 

The duplicated data reduced the time the drive’s read head needed to travel to access commonly used files. Modern consoles avoid this because they use Solid State Drives (SSD), which do not rely on mechanical movement and have near-instant seek times.

Helldivers 2 PC Install Size Reduction and Public Beta Access

Armstrong said Arrowhead partnered with Nixxes to bring the install footprint down to 17% of its original size. He noted that early tests show mission loading times for HDD users have increased by only a few seconds. 

Responding to concerns about previous performance estimates, Armstrong wrote, "I hear you ask, 'Didn't you just tell us all that you duplicate data because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times worse?' I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass."

He explained that earlier projections were based on industry data; meanwhile, Armstrong said, "In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns." He added that internal measurements now show around 11% of Helldivers 2 PC players were using a mechanical HDD last week.

Armstrong also said the majority of loading time in Helldivers 2 comes from level generation rather than asset loading. According to him, level generation runs in parallel with reading assets from the disk, and remains the main factor affecting load times, even for HDD users.

A public beta is now live, letting players keep all progression and matchmaking, while saving around 131 GB and helping test performance.

Arrowhead plans to make the reduced-size build the default version once the beta confirms stable performance.