PC games keep getting bigger, but Helldivers 2 just delivered the perfect counterexample: Arrowhead has somehow slashed its size by a staggering 85%.

Hard drives and SSDs continue to grow, yet so do game install sizes. By 2025, it will have become normal to see PC releases ranging from 100 to 200 GB, whereas 30 GB used to be considered huge. But Helldivers 2 is breaking that trend. Arrowhead Game Studios announced on Steam that they managed to reduce the game’s size by 85% through the elimination of full data duplication, dropping it from approximately 154 GB to just 23 GB. That’s a reduction of around 131 GB.

Impressively, this is even smaller than the installation size on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, which sit around 35 GB. This raises a humorous question: how much duplicate data was sitting in the game all this time? It almost feels like the game had been installed six times over. Originally, Helldivers 2 duplicated assets to accommodate older HDDs, but it seems Arrowhead finally found a way to work around this limitation.

Other developers could certainly take notes — especially those working on enormous franchises like Call of Duty. After thanking Sony’s porting team at Nixxes for their support, Arrowhead didn’t go into technical details, but they did outline how players can join the minimal-size version. Following multiple rounds of internal QA testing, the studio has launched it as a public technical beta.

Players can opt into the Slim beta on Steam right now: right-click Helldivers 2 in your library, select Properties, open the Betas tab, and choose Slim. The reduced size results in only slightly slower loading times — just a few seconds — and aside from the installation footprint, there are no functional differences. You join the same galactic war, use the same account, and all progress, purchases, and contributions carry over between versions.

Source: PCGamer, Steam