Helldivers 2 rivals Call of Duty's notoriously chunky file sizes as its latest update takes the shooter above 140GB on Steam: "This is getting beyond ridiculous"

Helldivers 2's latest update may have added plenty of exciting stuff, from hive worlds to new enemies, but it's also had an unfortunate side effect, with the third-person shooter now pushing beyond 140GB on Steam.

If you're a console player, this might come as a bit of a shock – on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, Helldivers 2 is only a fraction of that size. It's a whole other story on Steam, though, where the shooter's file size has doubled since its launch last year, apparently taking notes from Call of Duty and its notoriously hard drive-hungry space requirements.

"Today's update has now put the PC build size at over 140GB," one Reddit user points out today following the Into the Unjust rollout. "Arrowhead, I love you guys and love the game, but you need to do something about all the duplicated assets in the files to bring it back down. This is getting beyond ridiculous."

Today's update has now put the PC build size at over 140GB. Arrowhead, I love you guys and love the game, but you need to do something about all the duplicated assets in the files to bring it back down. This is getting beyond ridiculous. from r/Helldivers

They're clearly not the only ones feeling frustrated, with their post having accumulated 8.7K upvotes at the time of writing. "The size is the current issue that's locking me out of the game," one player responds. "I can't fathom why it is so big. If they took time to fix it I would be the happiest."

"I keep having to delete games just to make room for it," another says, while one player adds, "We are getting dangerously close to COD levels of game size. (And that's not a good thing)."

As the original Reddit poster has explained, the reason is most likely due to Arrowhead making sure everything runs smoothly on HDD rather than assuming that everyone has an SSD at their disposal. "By duplicating assets in different areas of the game data, it would reduce seek time on hard drives by not forcing it to have to jump back and forth between different areas of the drive to fetch data and assets," they write. "Problem is this technique is now grossly redundant on newer technology like SSD and NVMe drives."

At the time of writing, developer Arrowhead doesn't appear to have responded to these concerns, but with the amount of players also flooding the official Discord server with complaints, it seems likely that it'll only be a matter of time before we hear something. In the meantime, don't let those new bugs bite.

Helldivers 2 studio CEO says the "vast majority" of people "silently play" the shooter, which means the devs can't just look at Reddit and what streamers are saying for feedback: "This is a challenge for all games."