Helldivers 2: Devs Explain 100GB PC File Size & Future Fix

Last Updated: November 3, 2025

As Helldivers across the galaxy fight for Super Earth, many PC players are waging a different war on the home front: a battle for precious hard drive space. With a required install size of 100 GB, Helldivers 2 demands a significant chunk of storage, leaving many players wondering why the wildly successful co-op shooter is so large.

After much community speculation, Arrowhead Game Studios has provided a clear, technical explanation—and it reveals a deliberate choice to support older hardware that has major consequences for the majority of today's players.

A File Size Forged for an Older Era

For the millions enjoying its chaotic, satirical brand of galactic warfare, Helldivers 2 has been a technical marvel. However, its 100 GB storage requirement on PC has been a persistent point of discussion. While not the largest file size in modern gaming, it's substantial enough to be a headache for players managing space on their SSDs.

Initial theories from the community ranged from uncompressed 4K textures to pre-packaged future content. The actual reason, however, is more surprising. In a detailed tech blog, developers from Arrowhead explained that the game's file structure was designed to accommodate players using traditional spinning hard disk drives (HDDs).

To prevent stuttering and long load times on slower HDDs, which struggle with "seek time" (the physical time it takes for the drive's head to find data), developers often duplicate game assets. By placing copies of frequently needed data in multiple locations on the disk, the game ensures that the information can be accessed quickly, regardless of where the read head is. This creates a smoother experience for HDD users but comes at a steep cost: a massively inflated file size.

The SSD Trade-Off

This HDD-centric design is largely redundant for players using Solid State Drives (SSDs), which have become the standard for PC gaming. SSDs have no moving parts and near-instantaneous seek times, so duplicating assets provides no performance benefit and simply consumes valuable storage space.

The Arrowhead team is fully aware of this trade-off. They have acknowledged that the current file size is "unacceptably large" and that a solution is possible. Re-architecting the game's data packaging to be optimized for SSDs could, in their words, "theoretically slice the size in half."

However, implementing such a major change is not a simple task. The studio has stated that it won't undertake this massive overhaul until it is confident that "most of our PC players are using SSD drives." This highlights a difficult balancing act for developers: supporting the widest possible range of hardware versus optimizing for the modern standard.

The Ongoing Battle for Hard Drive Space

Arrowhead's explanation reveals a fascinating insight into the challenges of PC game development. The decision to support older HDDs was a move to make Helldivers 2 accessible to more players at launch, but it has resulted in a significant inconvenience for the majority who have upgraded to faster storage.

For now, PC players must continue to allocate 100 GB to the galactic war effort. But there is a silver lining. The developers have not only identified the problem but have a clear, albeit long-term, solution in mind. As SSD adoption becomes nearly universal, players can look forward to a future patch that could reclaim a massive 40-50 GB of their drive space. Until then, the war for Managed Democracy will continue to be fought alongside the war for storage.