Helldivers 2 on PC has gone from storage hog to surprisingly lightweight overnight.
For most of this year, the game demanded around 154GB of space on PC, which was especially painful when the console versions sat at a fraction of that size.
After months of pressure from players and multiple dev comments about looking into the issue, Arrowhead has finally rolled out a new “slim version” of the game that cuts the install down to roughly 23GB.
That’s a reduction of about 131GB, or around 85% of the original footprint, all without stripping out content or features.
What Caused the Original 154GB File Size?
The installation grew so large not because of high-end textures, but because of how the data was originally organized.
When Helldivers 2 first launched, the PC version was structured with older mechanical hard drives in mind.
To keep load times reasonable for people still running the game on HDDs, the devs duplicated a huge number of files and arranged them in a way that made it faster for those drives to read assets sequentially.
It fixed the seek-time issues on mechanical drives, though the trade-off was an installation that became much bigger than it had to be.
Each new update added more weight to an already heavy install, which is why PC players found themselves with 150GB+ while consoles held steady in the mid-20GB range.
How Did Arrowhead Shrink the Game by 131GB?
With the new update, Arrowhead and Nixxes have gone back through that structure and removed all the duplicated data.
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Instead of shipping multiple copies of textures, assets, and bundles scattered around the drive, the slim build now keeps a single clean set and reorganizes how the game reads from it.
Internally, this meant fully “de-duplicating” the install and rebuilding the way data is packaged for PC, which is why the size difference is so dramatic.
The game didn’t lose any scale because the update simply removed all the duplicate data that existed for old HDD setups.
One of the biggest concerns going into this change was performance, especially for the small percentage of players still on HDDs.
Earlier estimates suggested that ripping out duplicate data might seriously hurt loading times on older drives.
Once Arrowhead had more detailed internal metrics, though, the studio realized that most of Helldivers 2’s loading is driven by level generation rather than raw disk reads.
In practice, HDD users lose only a few seconds at most, and SSD players will barely notice any difference at all.
The trade-off is a handful of seconds versus more than a hundred gigabytes of reclaimed space, which is an easy win for most people.
How Do You Access the New 23GB “Slim Version”?
Right now, the storage update is live as a public technical beta on Steam instead of taking over the main build.
Anyone who wants the smaller install can grab it by opting into the slim branch in the game’s Beta tab (often labeled something like prod_slim).
After selecting it, Steam will switch Helldivers 2 over to the slimmer build. Both versions run in the same matchmaking system, with no exclusive servers for either side, and everyone keeps the same account and progression.
If anyone hits issues, they can switch out of the beta and go back to the legacy build with their progress intact.
Taken together, the 85% reduction feels like one of the most consumer-friendly technical updates Helldivers 2 has received.
Players get the same missions, enemies, weapons, Warbonds, and events, but with a fraction of the storage cost and almost no practical downside.
It’s no surprise that a lot of people who bounced off the game purely because of its size are now talking about reinstalling it.
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