Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB • Hacker News Board

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#101

Post by afavour » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #93

afavour wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it. If they were on the ho…

The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs. That's why they did the performance analysis and referred to their telemetry before pushing the fix. The impact is minimal because their game is already spending an equivalent time doing other loading work, and the 5x I/O slowdown only affects 11% of players (perhaps less now that the game fits on a cheap consum…

> If someone "takes pride in their work" and makes my game load five times longer, I'd rather they go find something else to take pride in.

And others who wish one single game didn't waste 130GB of their disk space, it's fine to ignore their opinions?

They used up a ton more disk space to apply an ill-advised optimization that didn't have much effect. I don't really understand why you'd consider that a positive thing.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#102

Post by scruple » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:50 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #45

snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it. If they were on the ho…

Studios store a lot of builds for a lot of different reasons. And generally speaking, in AAA I see PlayStation being the biggest pig so I would wager their PS builds are at least the same size if not larger. People knew and probably raised alarm bells that fell to the wayside because it's easier/cheaper to throw money at storage solutions than it is engineering.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#103

Post by shantara » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:50 PM UTC

NBJack wrote: post #69

snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

The game is released on both PC and PS5, the latter of which was designed (and marketed) to take advantage of SSD speeds for streaming game content near real time. The latest Ratchet and Clank, the poster child used in part to advertise the SSD speed advantage, suffers on traditional hard drives as well in the PC port. Returnal is in the same boat. Both were originally PS5 exclusives.

The HDD performance suffers very much during the portal loading sequences in Ratchet and Clank, but even the entry level SSD performs fine, with little visible difference compared to the PS5 one. It’s more about random access speed than pure throughput

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#104

Post by stanac » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:51 PM UTC

dotwaffle wrote: post #89

fleabitdev wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, the bug was 131 GB of wasted disk space after installation. Because the waste came from duplicate files, it should have had little impact on download size (unless there's a separate bug in the installer...) This is why the cost of the bug was so easy for the studio to ignore. An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years, so they might ha…

> An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years Nah, not even close. Let's guess and say there were about 15 million copies sold. 15M * 131GB is about 2M TB (2000 PB / 2 EB). At 30% mean utilisation, a 100Gb/s port will do 10 PB in a month, and at most IXPs that costs $2000-$3000/month. That makes it about $400k in bandwidth charges (I imagine 90%+ is…

Off topic question.

> I imagine 90%+ is peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit

How hosting inside ISPs function? Does ISP have to MITM? I heard similar claims for Netflix and other streaming media, like ISPs host/cache the data themselves. Do they have to have some agreement with Steam/Netflix?

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#105

Post by zelphirkalt » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:52 PM UTC

fleabitdev wrote: post #28

Back of the envelope, in the two years since the game was released, this single bug has wasted at least US$10,000,000 of hardware resources. That's a conservative estimate (20% of people who own the game keep it installed, the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month, the install base grew linearly over time), so the true number is probably several times higher. In other words, t…

I should probably look up the company that made the game or the publisher and avoid games they make in the future.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#106

Post by jsheard » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:52 PM UTC

vardump wrote: post #87

robin_reala wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably only 11% of PC players, approximately 100% of console players will be on SSD.

Rather 89% PC players have an SSD. For the console players much less. People (read: hordes of kids) are still using PS3, PS4, etc.

Helldivers 2 is only on current gen consoles so older ones are beside the point, the current ones use NVMe SSDs exclusively. PC is the only platform where HDDs or SATA SSDs might still come up.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#107

Post by garaetjjte » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:53 PM UTC

NBJack wrote: post #69

snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

The game is released on both PC and PS5, the latter of which was designed (and marketed) to take advantage of SSD speeds for streaming game content near real time. The latest Ratchet and Clank, the poster child used in part to advertise the SSD speed advantage, suffers on traditional hard drives as well in the PC port. Returnal is in the same boat. Both were originally PS5 exclusives.

I played Rift Apart from HDD and apart from extra loading time during looped animations it was fine. On the other hand Indiana Jones Great Circle was barely playable with popping-in textures and models everywhere.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#108

Post by ZekeSulastin » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:54 PM UTC

vardump wrote: post #87

robin_reala wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably only 11% of PC players, approximately 100% of console players will be on SSD.

Rather 89% PC players have an SSD. For the console players much less. People (read: hordes of kids) are still using PS3, PS4, etc.

Which doesn’t matter at all in the case of Helldivers 2 as it’s only available for PC, PS5, and XBS/X. That’s a good part of why PC players were so irritated, actually: when all this blew up a few months ago, the PC install sizes was ~133 GB vs the consoles’ 36 GB.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#109

Post by WreckVenom » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:55 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #45

snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it. If they were on the ho…

It is a trade-off. The game was developed on a discontinued engine, the game has had numerous problems with balance, performance and generally there were IMO far more important bugs. Super Helldive difficulty wasn't available because of performance issues.

I've racked up 700 hours in the game and the storage requirements I didn't care about.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#110

Post by detaro » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:56 PM UTC

stanac wrote: post #104

dotwaffle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years Nah, not even close. Let's guess and say there were about 15 million copies sold. 15M * 131GB is about 2M TB (2000 PB / 2 EB). At 30% mean utilisation, a 100Gb/s port will do 10 PB in a month, and at most IXPs that costs $2000-$3000/month. That makes it about $400k in bandwidth charges (I imagine 90%+ is…

Off topic question. > I imagine 90%+ is peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit How hosting inside ISPs function? Does ISP have to MITM? I heard similar claims for Netflix and other streaming media, like ISPs host/cache the data themselves. Do they have to have some agreement with Steam/Netflix?

The CDN/content provider ships servers to the ISP which puts them into their network. The provider is just providing connectivity and not involved on a content-level, so no MITM etc needed.