Our hard drives get bigger, but so do the games. In 2025, we are beset by filesizes run amok. Time was, I'd consider a 30 GB game to be an unfathomable imposition on my C drive. How young and naive I was—as we speak, multiple games north of 100, even 200 GB are manspreading across my disks.
But that number just decreased by one. In an update on Steam, Arrowhead announced that it has performed some manner of warlockery and reduced the footprint of Helldivers 2 by 85%. "By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%)."
This is, as Arrowhead itself notes, closer to (or actually, better than) the game's install size on consoles, where it's around 35 GB or so, and it does beg the question as to just how much duplicated data the studio had cluttering up the joint. Were we all accidentally installing the game six times? And how many other space-hogs on my SSD could pull this same trick if they did their legwork?
Well, don't read too much into it. As we covered a little while ago, Helldivers 2 duped a load of info specifically to make life easier for clattery old mechanical hard drives. I suppose Arrowhead's found a way of getting around the issues HDDs present. Could other devs apply the same trick? I live in hope.
Apart from thanking Sony port-house Nixxes for its assistance, Arrowhead doesn't go into much detail about how it pulled this off, but it does tell you how you can get in on Helldivers 2's new, minimalist experience. "We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta… This is live NOW!"
You can opt into the beta on Steam. Just right-click Helldivers 2 in your library, go to Properties, then Betas, then select the Slim beta from the drop-down box. Then, I don't know, fill up all that extra space with 4K rips of The Importance of Being Earnest.
It is, of course, a beta, so there may be bugs lurking in Helldivers 2's new, svelte form, but Arrowhead seems quite confident. "The change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times—seconds at most," it says. "There are no functional differences between the legacy and slim versions besides the installation size. You will be connected to the same galactic war as everyone else and be using the same account you always do—so all progression, war contributions and purchases will carry over between the different versions."
Now, please join me in staring meaningfully at Call of Duty.
