In September 2025, Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead said that reducing the install size of their game on PC was a top priority. Today, those efforts have started to bear fruit.
In a new post made to the Helldivers 2 Steam page, Arrowhead says that they were able to reduce the PC installation size by a whopping 131GB. With the help of Nixxes, the PC install size went from 154GB to 23GB after "de-duplicating" the data for Helldivers 2.
It's that issue of data duplication that landed Arrowhead in hot waters with fans in the first place. As Reddit user RaidingForPants discovered back in September, Helldivers 2 stored multiple copies of the same textures and models. One particular normal map was found to be duplicated 128 times, taking up a total of 2GB on its own. While this is good for older mechanical drives (to reduce seek time), it led to the game becoming extremely bloated.
The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected. 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%).
Further good news: the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most. “Wait a minute,” 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. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. 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.
Now things are different. We have real measurements specific to our game instead of industry data. We now know that the true number of players actively playing HD2 on a mechanical HDD was around 11% during the last week (seems our estimates were not so bad after all). We now know that, contrary to most games, the majority of the loading time in HELLDIVERS 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs.
Now things are different. We have real measurements specific to our game instead of industry data. We now know that the true number of players actively playing HD2 on a mechanical HDD was around 11% during the last week (seems our estimates were not so bad after all). We now know that, contrary to most games, the majority of the loading time in HELLDIVERS 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs.
Eventually, the slimmed down Helldivers 2 will be the default version for everyone. If everything goes well, that Until then, you can test it out for yourself by manually opting into the beta. You can try out the beta by following these instructions:
Beta Instructions
Warning!
Modders beware! Any patch we roll out can break the game if you have mods installed and this one is no exception. We recommend that only players with a clean installation opt-in to the slim version. As always, you mod the game at your own risk.
If any of this seems a bit scary to you, we encourage you to just sit back and wait for the slim version to become the default version.
Opting in to the slim version
Step 1.
In your steam library, right click on HELLDIVERS 2 and select ‘Properties’.
Step 2.
Next select the ‘Betas’ tab.
Step 3.
In the Beta Participation drop down list, select “prod_slim”
Step 4.
Finally just close the properties dialog and wait for the game to download the patch!
Opting out of the slim version
If for any reason you want to opt-out of the slim version, you can repeat the above steps and select “None” from the Beta Participation drop-down instead. If you opt-out due to experiencing problems with the slim version, please report them to our player support team.
Opting in to the legacy version
In case of emergency! Once we make the slim version the default version, you will be able to opt-in to the legacy version by selecting “prod_legacy” from the Beta Participation down-down. This will only work for a limited time, so please be sure to report any issues specific to the slim version to our player support team.
Warning!
Modders beware! Any patch we roll out can break the game if you have mods installed and this one is no exception. We recommend that only players with a clean installation opt-in to the slim version. As always, you mod the game at your own risk.
If any of this seems a bit scary to you, we encourage you to just sit back and wait for the slim version to become the default version.
Opting in to the slim version
Step 1.
In your steam library, right click on HELLDIVERS 2 and select ‘Properties’.
Step 2.
Next select the ‘Betas’ tab.
Step 3.
In the Beta Participation drop down list, select “prod_slim”
Step 4.
Finally just close the properties dialog and wait for the game to download the patch!
Opting out of the slim version
If for any reason you want to opt-out of the slim version, you can repeat the above steps and select “None” from the Beta Participation drop-down instead. If you opt-out due to experiencing problems with the slim version, please report them to our player support team.
Opting in to the legacy version
In case of emergency! Once we make the slim version the default version, you will be able to opt-in to the legacy version by selecting “prod_legacy” from the Beta Participation down-down. This will only work for a limited time, so please be sure to report any issues specific to the slim version to our player support team.
