*We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected._
By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!*
And the community is still mad, because apparently doing this after 2 years is WRONG
Oh shit! I might actually reinstall this thing
Never forget:
In the case of Mario it’s a smart way of handling the limited data available, its not a duplicate texture like Helldivers, its the same cloud copy pasted just with a different color.
From what I understand Helldivers had the same files duplicated multiple times so that HDD could find them easily (somehow)
Ahh yes, the same approach I have to script development: multiple files, in different places, for different platforms, all with the same code!
Okay, this is insane, and insanely good. Insane that they’re using 5x the amount of space needed, and good because now I can forever leave the game installed in case a friend asks me to play, and won’t have to worry about losing 16~% of my 1tb ssd for games.
I opted into the
prod_slimbeta and it works as advertised. 22.01 GB on my SSD and the game is running the same as before, as far as I can tell.The fact that they were using 5-6x more space than required in the first place is pretty infuriating. How many other games are doing this shit? Explains why many games now are 100-200GB.
You ever heard of the fit girl? She does this to every single game she touches and it is amazing to see.
Yes but then takes 17 straight hours to decompress a 30gb game during install.
My Genshin install on PC would be ~115 GB (in practice it’s more bc I have an extra voice pack), while the same game on mobile is allegedly ~30 GB 😒
I found that surprising too. In the article, they explain that this was on purpose to improve loading times for people on slow HDDs.
And they talk about how it’s seconds different for hdd users with the tiny size lol
Now replace a badly modified version of FSR 1 with support for FSR 3.x, 4.x and DLSS, as we are in 2025 please.
Fuck fake frames. All my homies use real frames.
They are still better anti aliasing than TAA.
I never said anything about frame generation.
This vibes like that scene in Dumb and Dumber where Harry is standing next to a fire complaining that his fingers are about to fall off, and Lloyd says “you should take these extra gloves. Mine are getting sweaty”.
This game currently consumes 30% of the hard drive on my main PC.
I’m impressed by the technical feat, but am also annoyed that they knew they were wasting this much space and simply did not care. I’m betting every 100GB game is like this.
That’s what happens when your artists are not technically literate. I worked with photographers / videographers for a bit and I had to explain to them that no, you can’t just copy paste your 40Mb photos onto the online gallery, even if yes, the Web page will just resize them. We don’t actually need a full gallery of 600dpi files online thanks.
Feckin muppets.
Read the article before making assumptions. It’s nothing to do with the artists.
They were deliberately duplicating all of their data to speed up load times for mechanical disks. Based on industry standard assumptions, they thought this was necessary. The article goes more into why it wasn’t actually necessary after all. But it was nothing to do with the efficiency of their models and textures.
It’s 2025. If all you have is a 400GB hd, that’s a you problem. Sure, that was a big number over a decade ago, but that number is nothing now. Same energy as complaining that it takes too many floppy drives to store your files. Like you think it makes it sound like a huge number when you phrase it as 30% and all it shows is you have an outdated rig and are mad that progress moved on without you.
Programmers need to respect other people’s hardware. A 4TB HDD currently costs more than it did a decade ago.
My data is stored on a mirrored RAID, and backed up on two alternating offsite drives. For every TB of space I use, I buy 4. I do not consider this negotiable.
I don’t back up game installs, but by point remains valid. 90% of hardware advances gets pissed away by bloated shitcode. I see it every day.
A 4TB HDD currently costs more than it did a decade ago.
What the fuck are you on? That’s RAM that’s currently skyrocketing because of AI, you dipshit. I just bought a 12 TB HDD for $250. Memory is the cheapest it’s ever been and has always been on a downward decline like that. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
No the issue isn’t with the user having a 400GB drive. The issue is the devs chose to leave 131GB of unnecessary duplication in the game artifacts when published. That is a fundamental problem with software in general but games especially.
Blaming the customer for expecting to have a decent product is laughably misplaced. Part of software being a decent product is it being optimized. This was an absolute failure and they should really be putting out an apology instead of patting themselves on the back.
It’s great the game is so much smaller now but it should have been this new size at launch. Certainly not 131GB bigger than it needed to be.
It wasn’t unnecessary, according to their knowledge at the time. They even wrote that in a previous post and referred to that information in this post.
Seems like you didn’t read either and just decided to get angry.
Cool, wanna go through the list of modern games and see their file sizes? COD is somewhere around 300GB. Anything AAA is usually 80-100gb.
If all you have is a system capable of playing indie games, don’t shit on those of use who actually put effort into our hobby. A 1tb SSD is ~$90. It’s not some crazy ask. If you can’t do that, fine. But don’t drag the rest of us down with you.
They need 15% of that space.
It isn’t about the drives or if people can afford a certain size SSD (although that matters more than you are admitting). It’s about asking better of people and companies responsible for destroying over a decade of hardware advancement due to bad optimization (to save money), overly-abstracted frameworks (to save money), and improper handling of assets (to save money).
They made a mistake in not prioritizing this, they fixed it and admitted there was a problem. That’s good. What isn’t good is people polishing their knobs as if the devs did this out of the goodness of their heart. They didn’t, they were losing players because people were speaking with time and money. Just like you wanted. Just like people in this thread are doing.
But glancing through your other replies I’ll just stop here. May your drive space remain vast, and your tolerance for badly-optimized software remain stronger than mine.
Realistically a single drive should be 3-4 terabytes in 2025… A 4 terabyte sata is like 200-230 bucks for a middling drive on Amazon right now.
Having 8 terabytes of storage is not hard to have. It’s not like you can’t put more storage in your PC. Seriously I would question anyone with less then even just 5 terabytes.
Holy shit, ok I’ll state it yet again and then I’m done. For the 3rd time, this isn’t about who can afford what drives or who has what drives or what drives exist in our universe. Pretend drives doesn’t exist if that is easier because the drives don’t matter. Drive space is a symptom of the underlying issue.
This is about the near universal trend of software companies destroying a decade plus of hardware performance gains because they refuse to properly optimize their software. Full stop. Anything else is a side effect of not properly optimizing things. The drive type arguments, drive space arguments…they disappear once the fundamental issue (optimization) is addressed.
Holding these companies accountable is how this gets fixed. It’s how this particular instance got fixed. This thread wouldn’t even exist if these weren’t legitimate complaints because the devs wouldn’t have bothered with this round of size reduction if there wasn’t a problem affecting their bottom line.
don’t shit on those of use who actually put effort into our hobby
A 1tb SSD is ~$90. It’s not some crazy ask
This take is very telling of the privileged economic background you come from. Totally out of touch with the reality most of your fellow humans live in.
I’ll be very surprised if you aren’t some white colonialist nepo-baby
So you get racist af to prove your point? Fuck off twat and stop being a bitch. It’s not unreasonable to put money into your hobby. That’s what you do. You buy a game here and there, and you upgrade your hardware.
What you don’t do is bitch and moan that you can’t keep up when the effort to do so isn’t that much and at the end of the day, no one owes you AAA games. Cry harder. It’s shit like this that makes gamers look like entitled bitches. You have it vastly better than any other time and you still take most of your time to bitch and moan.
Don’t need to be a racist piece of shit and attack people mate.
Even if we throw back and look to older tech that would be available in a poor African country you can find 5+ terabytes of storage for less than 30 bucks USD with shipping to African countries.
Your looking at 7200 rpm drives but storage space is not expensive even in the poorest country as long as you don’t demand the cutting edge. Load times will be a problem but if your poor you can still easily find second hand storage in large quantities for cheap. Iv been poor as fucking dirt. It sucks but as the saying goes, you can be poor or stupid. You shouldn’t be both. And as long as you’re smart about it, you can have pretty decently nice things for really really cheap. It’s just not going to be new and it’s going to be real hard to find but it’s doable.
So again, that take isn’t remotely privileged. It’s poorly stated sure, but the point being made is accurate.
Your take on the other hand is fucking disgusting and you should sit down and shut up.
I’m also white and have also technically benefited from colonialism, lol.
The problem with yours and @[email protected] line of thinking is that you are looking at that 90USD / 30USD through the lens of your own earning and buying power.
For someone in your hypothetical “poor African country”, that may well be days or weeks of income.
Both of you seem to be having a strong reaction to that statement, I get the impression I’ve struck a nerve and that you might be facing (and rejecting) an inconvenient truth.
I’m sorry if it came across as an ‘attack’, that was not my intention. I’m not here to massage anyone’s feelings, and hopefully you’ll be able to take some time for reflection and personal growth.
Ultimately, y’all in here simping for corps by excusing 100GB of inefficiency while getting down on “the poors” and it’s not a pretty look.
Bruh, this is a crazy, defensive rant. You’re defending multi-million dollar companies who are bad at their jobs and blaming the consumer who is getting poorer and poorer every year. Using COD as an example for normal, a famously repetitive franchise game whose developer is corpo as hell is not a good look. How many people at that studio are getting paid a good wage even relative to industry standard and not suffering burnout and other bad practices. Helldiver’s just proved that A) you can have something like 6x bloat for no reason which they themselves say will hardly impact HDDs B) this is largely technical incompetence as they vetted their initial assumptions and found them flawed.
This isn’t about them supporting HDD’s, they said they’ll barely be impacted. This is about a developer not knowing what they need to do to make a successful game and slowly figuring out what is unnecessary. If COD cared, they could lower it too.
Nah, it’s just not 1995 anymore. I was around for those times bro. I know what computer tech used to be. I know what it is now. I’ve seen the progression. And yes, if you only have a 500GB hard drive today, you’re the equivalent of someone trying use floppy disks.
Sucks to be told you fell behind, but guess what, you did! Just like 5 GB used to be enough, then 50, then 100… Guess what, you want all those fancy videos and cutscenes and graphics? Oh shit, they take space. Omg.
Sorry you’re trying to game in modern times with an Atari, but again, that’s a you problem. Maybe get a job and buy an SSD. Seriously, Samsung evo SSD 1tb are $90 right now. You’re telling me you can afford $40-70 games, but can’t buy a hard drive? Like seriously? You also try to play golf with old pieces of rebar and complain that it doesn’t work either?
Bunch of entitled people bitching that they’re owed something. You’re a consumer. They don’t owe you shit. Don’t like it, don’t buy it. Vote with your wallets like we tried to tell you decades ago.
Sucks to be told you fell behind, but guess what, you did! Just like 5 GB used to be enough, then 50, then 100… Guess what, you want all those fancy videos and cutscenes and graphics? Oh shit, they take space. Omg.
We are literally in a comment thread about how fancy graphics don’t need to take up 100+ GB. Like, come on dude.
Look man, I’m not gonna be your therapist. Get help, cause you talk crazy.
There are various coop games that no longer get played by me and my friends, entirely because of their install size.
Someone uninstalls to free up space, and then because it would take longer than our gaming nights to download, never gets played again unless one of us is instant that they download it ahead of time.
We just play something else.
To be fair that’s still an issue of out dated rigs.
It’s an understandable problem, but it is a “you” problem more then anything.
Companies could do a lot more to compress files and reduce file size but then you just move the problem from storage space to out dated CPUs with long load times and poor performance.
Really having less then 3-4 terabytes at this point is baffling.
But we’re not talking about compressing data. Just not wasting storage by having duplicate data in there. And I fail to see how it is a user’s problem when it’s the developers who are introducing the issue to begin with. If you are sold a product with an easily fixable problem from factory, you don’t take it accept the fault as your own.
I got 4TB of total storage, but i struggle severely with storage between all the car and flight sims with mods, multiplayer games with massive installs, and enormous single player games.
Duplicating the data many times over isn’t progress.
It was for HDDs, literally helping you people who refuse to advance. It was progress in the sense that it allowed you to play on your outdated system. They could have just told you to fuck off from the get go.
Imagine this in another product. Say you were looking at buying some clothes, and because they didn’t want to pay someone to cut the fabric, they just folded it over, stitched the outline of a shirt, and left all the fabric on the inside. Then when you point out that they must either be unskilled as tailors because they can’t even manage simple seam allowance, or greedy, because they choose not to just to add maybe a few pennies to the stockholder’s dividends, some loser who gets zero benefit from the extra fabric runs out of nowhere to explain how ‘it’s your fault. Don’t you have room in your closet for the extra material? Why don’t you just move to a bigger house? I’m morally superior because I’m complaining about your complaining about something you can’t fix rather than about the people who have the power to make the changes choosing not to! Why don’t you stick to wearing your hand-stitched designer clothes made with love and care if you can’t afford to buy a closet big enough to house all the pointless wastage of these incredible producers of generic, lowest common denominator, middle of the road, unoriginal t-shirts that people mostly buy because of marketing and familiarity bias? Don’t you know the only people who matter are the wealthy?’
Modders beware! Any patch we roll out can break the game if you have mods installed and this one is no exception. We recommend that only players with a clean installation opt-in to the slim version. As always, you mod the game at your own risk.
Huh. This game has anticheat. Do they want you modding or not? Also I was not aware there were mods.
AFAIK basically the only thing they care about is that you don’t cheat in premium currency or ruin other players experiences, they’re fine with local mods
As far as I know, they have been cool about client side mods like armor skins and textures but obviously they’re not cool with you giving your account a bunch of the premium currency
Asset swap mods are fine, probably anything purely client side is fine though I don’t know for sure. It can really auck to play with cheaters, I’ve played with someonw calling in turrets with no cooldown and it gets real annoying real fast, and like sure I can just leave, but there’s always going to be others joining and getting annoyed too. I hate the kernal level part of “kernal level anticheat”, not the anticheat part, and I’m really really happy that client side mods can safely be a thing
Well that specific hack sounds like it would be trivial to check for server side…
At least on nexus it’s all cosmetic as mods cannot add content
It’s how you got halo weapons before the warbond in the form of reskinned liberators. I also had one that was a railgun overcharge sounds, if the gun was fully charged it would go boop boop boop. There’s some that gives the b01 default armor cat ears. Some friends who are more courageous and/or undemocratic than me who have turned the adult filter off have reported some interesting armor and enemy reskins
Omg the railgun overcharge indicator sounds perfectly op for me an I now need it
It’s because it has mmo-like mechanics. They said it’s because they don’t want someone to cheat and ruin things like global orders to free a planet. Ex: someone can cheat and clear missions wayyy faster and overly contribute to if a planet tbat the entire community is working towards liberating from the filthy Terminids.
- loads more slowly on HDD
- now small enough for your SSD
And it turned out that the slower load on HDD wasn’t nearly as bad as they thought it would be.
Great for steam deck users
Anyone find anything nefarious in the EULA after this update?
Whenever they first said they were using data duplication, I said that modern hardware doesn’t benefit from that anymore. It used to work like that on old hardware and consoles, but not anymore. Glad they finally learned.
If you’re still using HDD for games in 2025 then what the fuck are you even playing at?
Even the consoles abandoned that.
filthy SSD gamer! so pathetic. real gamers play from ramdisks! what wooden pc are you even playing with less than 200 GB RAM?
Bro have you seen the prices on large SSDs?
Nobody is buying a 256gb drive for games anymore. That’s like 1 to 1.5 games nowadays. Instead 2-4TB drive is the most common purchase for a ‘games drive’. AI has roughly doubled the cost in two years for such drives - even higher for premium quality drives.
I’m not gonna poor-shame people who still play on spinning disk HDDs. AI hype continues to make gaming more expensive by the day.
A 2TB Drive is just over £100, even with the crazy memory prices lately. I’ve got one in my PS5 ffs. A bog standard SATA drive will do practically the same load times as NVME. It’s all about the access time.
Devs should abandon HDD completely. Look how much space they saved here by not wasting it on duplicated resources.
What? A SATA drive (presuming you mean a sata SSD, not mechanical) will do absolutely nowhere near the load times of NVME. SATA3 peak bandwidth is 600MB/s, closest drives gets in real world read speeds is around 550MB/s.
NVME drives do at least ten times that for a midrange one. Up to thirty times for the latest gen top of the line.
I know they are. For something like database work, they’re amazing. Now go an look at some game load time benchmarks.
Because I can guarantee you they’re nowhere near that much faster for 99% of games. Once you get off spinning rust, CPU speed remains the number one factor in load times. Because nearly everything is compressed and has to be unpacked and processed into the right formats by the system before it can be used.
Picking whatever comes up at the top from googling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeS88O4rWB8
Just scanning though that video I can see the biggest difference is like a second.
DirectStorage was supposed to be able to make game loading faster on faster SSDs, but as far as I can see that hasn’t really happened. The PS5 does actually get noticeably slower if you cobble a slower drive into it, although not really enough to break anything. The decompression units in that hardware are actually pretty good, and can keep up with the faster SSDs.
