Kate Moss once said "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels," which tells me that Kate Moss must have an extremely bland, uninteresting diet—and I say that as a small-town white guy in Canada, which should really tell you something. Still, it's sometimes not a bad idea to slim things down a little—such as in the case of Helldivers 2, which is ditching its 'large' build permanently later this month.
For any of this to make sense, you'll need to cast back to December 2025, when Arrowhead reduced the Helldivers 2 install size by a whopping 85%, from 154GB to 23GB. That's a hell of a cut, but it wasn't so much a case of developer wizardry as simply a matter of the game being massively over-bloated to begin with: Arrowhead said earlier in 2025 that the PC version of Helldivers 2 was so much larger than the console editions because it duplicated some data files in order to make up for the relatively poor performance of conventional hard drive drives (HDDs), which are significantly slower than solid-state drives (SSDs).
