HELLDIVERS 2 file-size on Steam gets massively reduced

One problem with a lot of modern games is just how big they're getting, but HELLDIVERS 2 is about to massively shrink thanks to work behind the scenes. In a news post on Steam the developers at Arrowhead Game Studios noted they pulled in Nixxes to help get it sorted.

They were making small changes across a few patches, but now the big stuff is here and you can try it out in a Steam Beta via the "prod_slim" branch. Right click the game, go to Properties -> Beta and select "prod_slim" from the drop-down box. The result should be a reduction in installation size from "~154GB to ~23GB". What an insane difference.

How did they do this? By "completely de-duplicating our data". They didn't do it before as they were worried about loading times for players who still have a traditional spinning HDD instead of an SSD. Something they spoke about in a previous news post to explain it a little more. But as it turns out, the difference is only a few seconds.

This will become the default for everyone once they've gone through feedback from the Beta to allow time for troubleshooting.

A big new update also just rolled out with Into the Unjust: 5.0.0 that brought with it the fun new premium warbond that has a minigun along with lots of improvements to the game overall.