Helldivers 2’s aggressive PC optimisation for hard disk drive users has caused the game to balloon in size. Due to a mass of duplicated assets, Arrowhead Game Studios’ brilliant co-op game is 150GB on PC, more than three times the size of its Xbox Series and PS5 counterpart.

As the multiplayer game faces “many more months” of major patches to fix the game’s massive number of game-ruining bugs, Arrowhead is also working on slimming down the game’s file size on PC.

Earlier this month, Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani explained that the team is “looking into” dropping support for hard disk drives as well as weighing up the feasibility of managing two branches of the game: one large file size HDD version and a smaller SSD version.

Speaking in an official developer interview, deputy technical director Mikek Eriksson explained that the ongoing file size issue for PC users is “unacceptably large right now”. Outside of Destiny 2 and Call of Duty, Helldivers 2 is one of the largest multiplayer games around in terms of file size, and that’s not good enough.

“There’s some games that don’t support this [hard disk drives] for this very reason,” the developer explained, “because you have to rely on duplicating files and so forth. So we’re exploring options. We’re looking into if we can have different patches for players who have mechanical hard drives and players who installed it on SSDs.”

Eriksson explained that moving towards this direction “could theoretically slice the size in half” for PC players, but that players need to take the idea with “a little pitch of salt” as they weight up all of the options. While the majority of the fanbase has been clear that SSDs are needed for modern gaming, there may still be HDD players that the team doesn’t want to disappoint.

Nevertheless, the technical director explained “there’s real options here to do quite big improvements in just reducing PC install size,” saying they’re “sure that we’ll get back with more information the next time we do one of these. But at least I want everyone to know that we’re looking into it. And I agree that it’s a little bit on the side of unacceptably large right now.”

There are a lot of issues currently circulating Helldivers 2 right now. While stomping out the game’s bugs may be a more pressing issue, this certainly isn’t one that should be left behind. After all, games—especially live service games—have to fight for that storage size on your machine, and Helldivers 2 is taking up a helluva lot of it.