The millions of players who regularly enjoy Helldivers 2 on PC (sales estimates put Steam owners at between 13 and 21 million) can rejoice, as the game's install size on this platform can now be reduced by around 85%. Helldivers 2 previously took roughly 154GB of space from a drive, but Nixxes (the Dutch PC port specialist that was acquired by Sony in July 2021 who also helped implementing upscaling support in May 2026) helped Arrowhead shrink it down to just 23GB, saving you 131GB of space.
The developers have completed several rounds of internal QA and are rolling this out as a public technical beta. Internal testing shows that, in the worst cases, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives.
Before doing this, Arrowhead measured the number of players actively playing Helldivers 2 on a mechanical HDD. As of last week, it was around 11% of the total. The majority of the loading time in the game is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation occurs in parallel with loading assets from the disk, making it the primary factor in loading time. Critically, testing showed that HDD users are only getting slightly worse mission loading times, in the order of a few seconds in the worst cases. This convinced Arrowhead to go ahead with the public technical beta.
If everything goes well during this testing phase, the developers plan to discontinue the legacy version sometime next year. Those interested in testing the reduced install size can opt in immediately by selecting the game in their Steam library, then navigating to Properties > Beta Participation and selecting prod_slim from the dropdown list.
Helldivers 2 is by far Sony's most significant live service success. In the span of a month since its launch in February 2024, the game had already sold more than five million units across PC and PlayStation 5, with the former platform accounting for the lion's share. In August 2025, the game launched even on Microsoft's Xbox Series S and X consoles and immediately performed well over there, too.
The most recent large update is September's Into the Unjust, which introduced new enemies, missions, and Hive Worlds.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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