Helldivers 2 PC Version’s Massive 150 GB Size Gets Explained
The massive size of Helldivers 2‘s installation file on PC, which is around 150 GB, was explained by the Deputy Technical Director of the game’s developing studio, Arrowhead, in a blog post on the title’s official Steam page on Oct. 3, 2025.
According to the developer, much of the game’s bulk size on PC comes from deliberate data duplication, an old-school practice aimed at reducing loading times that was primarily used to optimize games for older storage media, particularly mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) and optical discs like DVDs.
The implementation of the outdated data duplication practice is caused by the main issue of mechanical HDDs: seek time. An HDD stores data on a spinning platter, and a physical arm with a read head has to move across the platter to find and retrieve data. This process led to the practice of data duplication, where multiple copies of game assets are placed in different locations on the disk to improve the speed of searching for and retrieving data on the HDD.
Consoles and PCs with SSDs don’t have this problem. SSDs can access any piece of data almost instantly, which is why the console versions of Helldivers 2 are much smaller. Notably, while the developer states that the 150 GB PC port is almost three times larger than the same game installed on consoles, Gaming.News noticed that on both PlayStation and Xbox, the game’s download file is under 25 GB, which makes it almost six times smaller than the PC version, unless the developer compared the size of one PS port with the sum of the two console game versions (Xbox + PlayStation).
The reason why the game’s developers are still using the data duplication practice is that they don’t know exactly how many players still use HDDs, with the closest estimate being 12% of all PC players. Removing duplication entirely could make load times painfully long for those users and Arrowhead is still seeking for the solution.
In short term, Helldivers 2 creators are planning to make some small gains in the next update by sweeping unused assets, but the freed space will most likely get occupied with new content immediately. So the game’s size won’t shrink, but at least it will stop growing.
As a medium-term solution, Arrowhead is exploring the possibility of taking some of the worst offenders in terms of duplication and de-duplicating them by putting them in “very common assets” bundles, which will always be loaded under set conditions (e.g., specific faction/biome), making loading times slightly worse for players using mechanical HDDs, which is unavoidable, according to the statement.
“Our early testing shows we should be able to keep this in the range of ‘less than 30 seconds’ rather than ‘several minutes.’ It can also increase the amount of RAM used by the game by loading ‘common’ data that is not always needed. If we don’t make ‘worst-case’ RAM usage worse, this should not be noticeable, but it is a risk we are monitoring. By doing some careful measurements and analysis, we should be able to deliver acceptable trade-offs between RAM usage, loading times, and install size,” explained the studio’s Deputy Technical Director.
As a long-term solution, the studio plans to make improvements to the engine, which will ensure no waste of RAM loading common data that isn’t needed, eliminating one of the drawbacks of the above technique.
Published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, playable on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and Windows PC, Helldivers 2 is set in the 22nd century and follows the story of shock troops called Helldivers, dispatched to combat various threats to humanity, protect Super Earth, and spread managed democracy.
As of the time of writing, the game has a “Mostly Positive” rating on Steam, with 773,476 reviews and an all-time peak of 458,709 players, according to SteamDB.