> 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 with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time.”
It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!
I expect it's a story that'll never get told in enough detail to satisfy curiosity, but it certainly seems strange from the outside for this optimisation to be both possible and acceptable.
> 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 hook for 150GB of cloud storage per player this would have been solved immediately.
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 consumer SSD).
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.
> 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.
By their own industry data (https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394...), deduplication causes a 5x performance increase loading data from HDD. There's a reason so many games are huge, and it's not because they're mining your HDD for HDDCoin.
The "problem" is a feature. The "so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it" mindset suggests that they were simply too lazy to ever run fdupes over their install directory, which is simply not the case. The duplication was intentional, and is still intentional in many other games that could but likely won't apply the same data minimization.
I'll gladly take this update because considerable effort was spent on measuring the impact, but not one of those "everyone around me is so lazy, I'll just be the noble hero to sacrifice my time to deduplicate the game files" updates.
23 GiB can be cached entirely in RAM on higher end gaming rigs these days. 154 GiB probably does not fit into many player's RAM when you still want something left for the OS and game. Reducing how much needs to be loaded from slow storage is itself an I/O speedup and HDDs are not that bad at seeking that you need to go to extreme lengths to avoid it entirely. The only place where such duplication to ensure linear reads may be warranted is optical media.
> These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not.
But if I read it correctly (and I may be mistaken) in actual practice any improvement in load times was completely hidden by level generation that was happening in parallel, making this performance improvement not worth it, since it was hidden by the other process.
Which describes both the PS2, PS3, PS4, Dreamcast, GameCube, Wii, and Xbox 360. The PS4 had a 2.5" SATA slot but the idiots didn't hook it up to the chipsets existing SATA port, but added a slow USB2.0<->SATA chip. So since the sunset of the N64 all stationary gaming consoles have been held back by slow (optical) storage with even worse seek times.
Some many game design crimes have a storage limitation at their core e.g. levels that are just a few rooms connected by tunnels or elevators.
> Further good news: the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most. “Wait a minute,” I hear you ask - “didn’t you just tell us all that you duplicate data because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times worse?”. I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
> Now things are different. We have real measurements specific to our game instead of industry data. We now know that the true number of players actively playing HD2 on a mechanical HDD was around 11% during the last week (seems our estimates were not so bad after all). We now know that, contrary to most games, the majority of the loading time in HELLDIVERS 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs.
They measured first, accepted the minimal impact, and then changed their game.
Yes, but I think maybe people in this thread are painting it unfairly? Another way to frame it is that they used industry best practices and their intuition to develop the game, then revisited their decisions to see if they still made sense. When they didn't, they updated the game. It's normal for any product to be imperfect on initial release. It's part of actually getting to market.
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.
I'm not sure that's necessarily true... Customers have limited space for games; it's a lot easier to justify keeping a 23GB game around for occasional play than it is for a 154GB game, so they likely lost some small fraction of their playerbase they could have retained.
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.
> I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements
I have to check. You're assumption is correct. I am one of very few.
I don't know the numbers and I'm gonna check in a sec but I'm wondering whether the suppliers (publishers or whoever is pinning the price) haven't screwed up big time by driving prices and requirements without thinking about the potential customers that they are going to scare away terminally. Theoretically, I have to assume that their sales teams account for these potentials but I've seen so much dumb shit in practice over the past 10 years that I have serious doubts that most of these suits are worth anything at all, given that grown up working class kids--with up to 400+ hours overtime per year, 1.3 kids on average and approx. -0.5 books and news read per any unit of time--can come up with the same big tech, big media, economic and political agendas as have been in practice in both parts of the world for the better part of our lives--if you play "game master" for half a weekend where you become best friends with all the kiosks in your proximity.
> the effect on their bottom line is negligible
Is it, though? My bold, exaggerated assumption is that they would have had 10% more sales AND players.
And the thing is, that at any point in time when I, and a few I know, had time and desire to play, we would have had to either clean up our drives or invest game price + sdd price for about 100 hours of fun over the course of months. We would have gladly licked blood but no industry promises can compensate for even more of our efforts than enough of us see and come up with at work. As a result, at least 5 buyers and players lost, and at work and elsewhere you hear, "yeah, I would, if I had some guys to play with" ...
No - because most users also don't check install size on games, and unlike renting overpriced storage from a cloud provider, users paid a fixed price for storage up front and aren't getting price gouged nearly as badly. So it's a trade that makes sense.
Both entrants in the market are telling you that "install size isn't that important".
If you asked the player base of this game whether they'd prefer a smaller size, or more content - the vast majority would vote content.
If anything, I'd wager this decision was still driven by internal goals for the company, because producing a 154gb artifact and storing it for things like CI/CD are still quite expensive if you have a decent number of builds/engineers. Both in time and money.
I mean.. A few years ago, 1TB SSDs were still the best buy and many people haven't ugpraded still, and wasthing 15% of your total storage on just one game is still a pain for many.
I started my career as a software performance engineer. We measured everything across different code implementations, multiple OS, hardware systems, and in various network configurations.
It was amazing how often people wanted to optimize stuff that wasn't a bottleneck in overall performance. Real bottlenecks were often easy to see when you measured and usually simple to fix.
But it was also tough work in the org. It was tedious, time-consuming, and involved a lot of experimental comp sci work. Plus, it was a cost center (teams had to give up some of their budget for perf engineering support) and even though we had racks and racks of gear for building and testing end-to-end systems, what most dev teams wanted from us was to give them all our scripts and measurement tools to "do it themselves" so they didn't have to give up the budget.
That sounds like fascinating work, but also kind of a case study in what a manager's role is to "clear the road" and handle the lion's share of that internal advocacy and politicking so that ICs don't have to deal with it.
It's because patting yourself on the back for getting 5x performance increase in microbenchmark feels good and looks good on yearly review.
> But it was also tough work in the org. It was tedious, time-consuming, and involved a lot of experimental comp sci work. Plus, it was a cost center (teams had to give up some of their budget for perf engineering support) and even though we had racks and racks of gear for building and testing end-to-end systems, what most dev teams wanted from us was to give them all our scripts and measurement tools to "do it themselves" so they didn't have to give up the budget.
Misaligned budgeting and goals is bane of good engineering. I've seen some absolutely stupid stuff like outsourcing hosting a simple site to us, because client would rather hire 3rd party to buy domain and put a simple site there (some advertising), than to deal with their own security guys and host it on their own infrastructure.
"It's a cost center"
"So is fucking HR, why you don't fire them ?"
"Uh, I'll ignore that, pls just invoice anything you do to other teams"
...
"Hey, they bought cloud solution that doesn't work/they can't figure it out, can you help them"
"But we HAVE stuff doing that cheaper and easier, why they didn't come to us"
"Oh they thought cloud will be cheaper and just work after 5 min setup"
I expect it's a story that'll never get told in
enough detail to satisfy curiosity, but it certainly
seems strange from the outside for this optimisation
to be both possible and acceptable.
From a technical perspective, the key thing to know is that the console install size for HD2 was always that small -- their build process assumed SSD on console so it didn't duplicate stuff.
154GB was the product of massive asset duplication, as opposed 23GB being the product of an optimization miracle. :)
How did it get so bad on PC?
Well, it wasn't always so crazy. I remember it being reasonable closer to launch (almost 2 years ago) and more like ~40-60GB. Since then, the devs have been busy. There has been a LOT of reworking and a lot of new content, and the PC install size grew gradually rather than suddenly.
This was probably impacted to some extent by the discontinued game engine they're using. Bitsquid/Stingray was discontinued partway through HD2 development and they continued on with it rather than restarting production entirely.
11% still play HD2 with a spinning drive? I would've never guessed that. There's probably some vicious circle thing going on: because the install size is so big, people need to install it on their secondary, spinning drive...
Even though I have two SSDs in my main machine I still use a hard drive as an overflow for games that I judge are not SSD worthy.
Because it's a recent 20TB HDD the read speeds approach 250MB/s and I've also specifically partitioned it at the beginning of the disk just for games so that it can sustain full transfer speeds without files falling into the slower tracks, the rest of the disk is then partitioned for media files that won't care much for the speed loss. It's honestly fine for the vast majority of games.
> It's honestly fine for the vast majority of games.
Yes, because they apparently still duplicate data so that the terrible IOPS of spinning disks does not factor as much. You people need to stop with this so that we can all have smaller games again! ;-) <--- (IT'S A JOKE)
PrimoCache is awesome, highly recommended. I’d only say to make sure your computer is rock stable before installing it, in my limited experience it exponentially increases the risk of filesystem corruption if your computer is unstable.
It is no surprise to me that people still have to use HDD for storage. SSD stopped getting bigger a decade plus ago.
SSD sizes are still only equal to the HDD sizes available and common in 2010 (a couple TB~). SSD size increases (availability+price decreases) for consumers form factors have entirely stopped. There is no more progress for SSD because quad level cells are as far as the charge trap tech can be pushed and most people no longer own computers. They have tablets or phones or if they have a laptop it has 256GB of storage and everything is done in the cloud or with an octopus of (small) externals.
I bought 4x (1TB->4TB the storage for half the price after my SSD died after 5 years (thanks samsung), what you mean they 'stopped being bigger'?
Sure, there is some limitation in format, can only shove so many chips on M.2, but you can get U.2 ones that are bigger than biggest HDD (tho price is pretty eye-watering)
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.
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.
I don't find it surprising at all. A ton of developers do optimizations based on vibes and very rarely check if they're actually getting a real benefit from it.
Would have saved us from all the people who reject any sort of optimization work because for them it is always "too early" since some product team wanted their new feature in production yesterday, and users waiting 5 seconds for a page load isn't considered bad enough just yet.
Premature optimization doesn't mean "We have an obvious fix sitting in front of us that will definitely improve things."
It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway."
So it doesn't save us from anything, it potentially delays launching and gives us the same result that product team would have given us, but more expensive.
> It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway."
the problem is that it doesn't say that directly so people without experience take it at face value.
Honestly looking over time I think that phrase did more bad than good.
Yes, of course you shouldn't optimize before you get your critical path stable and benchmark which parts take too much.
But many, many times it is used as excuse to delay optimisation so far that it is now hard to do because it would require to rewriting parts that "work just fine", or it is skipped because the slowness is just at tolerable level.
I have a feeling just spending 10-20% more time on a piece of code to give it a glance whether it couldn't be more optimal would pay for itself very quickly compared to bigger rewrite months after code was written.
Counterpoint: data driven development often leads to optimizations like this not being made because they're not the ones who are affected, their customers are. And software market is weird this way - little barriers to entry, yet almost nothing is a commodity, so there's no competitive pressure to help here either.
Game companies these days barely optimize engine graphical performance before release never mind the package size or patching speed. They just stamp higher minimum system requirements on the package.
I'd bet any amount of money a demo ran slow on one stakeholder's computer, who happened to have a mechanical hard drive, they attributed the slowness to the hard drive without a real investigation and optimizing for mechanical hard drive performance became standard practice. The demo may not have even been for this game, just a case of once bitten twice shy.
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
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.
> These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns
Unfortunately it's not only game development, all modern society seems operate like this.
IIRC this has been the “done thing” forever. I’m not in game development, but I think I recall hearing about it in the Xbox 360 era. Conventional options are picked by default, benchmarks are needed to overturn that. Looking at my hard drive, massive game installations are still very much the industry standard…
From a business perspective the disk footprint is only a high cost if it results in fewer sales, which I doubt it does to any significant degree. It is wasteful, but can see why optimization efforts would get focused elsewhere.
I think certain games dont even bother to optimize the install size so that you cant fit other games on the hard drive, I think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs
Having a humongous game might be a competitive advantage in the era of live-service games.
Users might be more hesitant to switch to another game if it means uninstalling yours and reinstalling is a big pain in the backside due to long download times.
I've often seen people mention that one reason for games like Call of Duty being so enormous is optimising for performance over storage. You'd rather decompress textures/audio files at install-time rather than during run-time, because you download/install so infrequently.
Yeah, I don't think any of the stores charge developers in proportion to how much bandwidth they use. If that changed then the priorities could shift pretty quickly.
Publishers do have to care somewhat on the Switch since Nintendo does charge them more for higher capacity physical carts, but a lot of the time they just sidestep that by only putting part (or none) of the game on the cart and requiring the player to download the rest.
Both things are sort of true. Its not sales where size can hurt you but retention, which is why it tended to matter more on phones. When you need space on your device the apps are listed from largest to smallest.
On both phones and PCs storage has just grown so its less of an issue. The one thing I have noticed is that Apple does its price windowing around memory so you pay an absurd amount for an extra 128 gb. The ultra competitive Chinese phone market crams high end phones with a ton of memory and battery. Si some popular Chinese phone games are huge compared to ones made for the iPhone.
Optimizing for disk space is very low on the priority list for pretty much every game, and this makes sense since its very low on the list of customer concerns relative to things like in-game performance, net code, tweaking game mechanics and balancing etc.
Apparently, in-game performance is not more important than pretty visuals. But that's based on hearsay / what I remember reading ages ago, I have no recent sources. The tl;dr was that apparently enough people are OK with a 30 fps game if the visuals are good.
I believe this led to a huge wave of 'laziness' in game development, where framerate wasn't too high up in the list of requirements. And it ended up in some games where neither graphics fidelity or frame rate was a priority (one of the recent Pokemon games... which is really disappointing for one of the biggest multimedia franchises of all time).
That used to be the case, but this current generation the vast majority of games have a 60 fps performance mode. On PS5 at least, I can't speak about other consoles.
High cost to who though. We see the same thing when it comes to RAM and CPU usage, the developer is not the one paying for the hardware and many gamers have shown that they will spend money on hardware to play a game they want.
Sure they may loose some sales but I have never seen many numbers on how much it really impacted sales.
Also on the disk side, I can't say I have ever looked at how much space is required for a game before buying it. If I need to clear out some stuff I will. Especially with it not being uncommon for a game to be in the 100gb realm already.
That all being said, I am actually surprised by the 11% using mechanical hard drives. I figured that NVME would be a lower percentage and many are using SSD's... but I figured the percent with machines capable of running modern games in the first place with mechanical drives would be far lower.
I do wonder how long it will be until we see games just saying they are not compatible with mechanical drives.
That already happened :) Starfield claimed to not support HDDs and really ran bad with them. And I think I saw SSDs as requirement for a few other games now, in the requirement listings on steam.
> Starfield claimed to not support HDDs and really ran bad with them.
To be fair, at launch Starfield had pretty shit loading times even with blazing fast SSDs, and the game has a lot of loading screens, so makes sense they'll nip that one in the bud and just say it's unsupported with the slower type of disks.
Latest Ratchet and Clank game relies heavily on ps5’s nvme drive. Its PC port states that SSD is required. And IIRC, the experience on mechanical drives is quite terrible to the unplayable level.
>It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!
You should look at COD install sizes and almost weekly ridiculously huge "updates". 150gb for a first install is almost generous considering most AAA games.
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, the game studio externalised an eight-figure hardware cost onto their users, to avoid a five-to-six-figure engineering cost on their side.
Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam, because it's a legitimate optimisation in some cases. The only safeguard against this sort of waste is a company culture which values software quality. I'm glad the developers fixed this bug, but it should never have been released to users in the first place.
Steam compresses games as much as possible, so in the case of Helldivers 2, you had to download between ~30 and ~40 GB, which was then unpacked to 150 GB (according to SteamDB[0])
You are missing that each update takes AGES while it tortures your disk for patching the files (on my machine it takes 15min or so, and that's on an SSD). So I agree that this is careless and reminds me of the GTA5 startup time that was fixed by a dedicated player who finally had enough and reverse engineered the problem (see https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...). I still find these things hard to accept.
Steam update durations depend on compression + CPU performance + SSD I/O. Things will be harder when the disk is almost full and live defragmentation kicks in to get free space for contiguous files. Some SSDs are fast enough to keep up with such a load, but a lot of them will quickly hit their DRAM limits and suddenly that advertised gigabyte per second write speed isn't all that fast. Bonus points for when your SSD doesn't have a heatsink and moving air over it, making the controller throttle hard.
Patching 150GiB with a compressed 15GiB download just takes a lot of I/O. The alternative is downloading a fresh copy of the 150GiB install file, but those playing on DSL will probably let their SSD whizz a few minutes longer than spend another day downloading updates.
If your SSD is slower than your internet capacity, deleting install files and re-downloading the entire game will probably save you some time.
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 have asked the game studio to look into it.
This article presents it as a big success, but it could be read the opposite way: "Developers of Helldivers 2 wasted 130 GB for years and didn't care because it was others people computers"
> 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 peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit), and you could quite easily build a server that would push 100Gb/s of static objects for under $10k a pop.
It would surprise me if the total additional costs were over $1M, considering they already have their own CDN setup. One of the big cloud vendors would charge $100M just for the bandwidth, let alone the infrastructure to serve it, based on some quick calculation I've done (probably incorrectly) -- though interestingly, HN's fave non-cloud vendor Hetzner would only charge $2M :P
Isn't it a little reductive to look at basic infrastructure costs? I used Hetzner as a surrogate for the raw cost of bandwidth, plus overheads. If you need to serve data outside Europe, the budget tier of BunnyCDN is four times more expensive than Hetzner.
But you might be right - in a market where the price of the same good varies by two orders of magnitude, I could believe that even the nice vendors are charging a 400% markup.
> 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.
Makes sense, initial claim was that HD2 size was mainly because of duplicated assets, and any compression worth it's salt would de-duplicate things effectively.
> the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month
Out of curiousity, how do you come up with a number for this? I would have zero idea of how to even start estimating such a thing, or even being able to tell you whether "marginal cost of wasted hard drive storage" is even a thing for consumers.
> Originally, the game’s large install size was attributed to optimization for mechanical hard drives since duplicating data is used to reduce loading times on older storage media. However, it turns out that Arrowhead’s estimates for load times on HDDs, based on industry data, were incorrect.
It wasn't a bug. They made a decision on what to optimise which was based on incomplete / incorrect data and performed the wrong optimisation as a result.
As a player of the game, I didn't really care that it took up so much space on my PC. I have 2TB dedicated for gaming.
Why not offer 2 versions for download and let the user choose, whether they want to block their whole disk with a single game, or accept a bit longer loading times? Or let the user at installation time make an informed decision by explaining the supposed optimization? Or let the user decide before downloading, what resolution (ergo textures) they want as the highest resolution they will play the game at and only download the textures they need up to that resolution?
I recently downloaded Hunt showdown. I think it was around 70 gigs. About a month later, I had to update it. The download was the same size. I think they literally just overrode the entire game because they were too lazy to update it properly.
I observed this too with some other games. Really annoying, when you need to redownload tens of gigabytes , because they cannot be arsed to put a proper updater. Things that were solved by most games way before Steam became even big.
Possibly a similar process to when you go into an AWS account, and find dozens of orphaned VMs, a few thousand orphaned disk volumes, etc., saving like $10k/month just deleting unused resources.
It's not a case of forgotten data, it's duplicated for access time reasons, like with optical media.
It follows in the footsteps of trading in storage for less compute and/or better performance.
An opposite approach in the form of a mod for Monster Hunter: Wilds recently made it possible [0] for end-users to decompress all the game textures ahead of time. This was beneficial there, because GPU decompression was causing stalls, and the trading in of compute for less storage resulted in significantly worse performance.
I've been really curious precisely what changed, and what sort of optimization might have been involved here.
Because offhand, I know you could do things like cute optimizations of redundant data to minimize seek time on optical media, but with HDDs, you get no promises about layout to optimize around...
The only thing I can think of is if it was literally something as inane as checking the "store deduplicated by hash" option in the build, on a tree with copies of assets scattered everywhere, and it was just nobody had ever checked if the fear around the option was based on outcomes.
(I know they said in the original blog post that it was based around fears of client performance impact, but the whole reason I'm staring at that is that if it's just a deduplication table at storage time, the client shouldn't...care? It's not writing to the game data archives, it's just looking stuff up either way...)
I'm not entirely clear what you're trying to say, but, my understanding is that they simply put lots of copies of files in lots of places like games have done for a long time, in the hopes it would lower seek times on HDDs for those players who use them.
They realised, after a lot of players asking, that it wasn't necessary, and probably had less of an impact than they thought.
They removed the duplicates, and drastically cut the install size. I updated last night, and the update alone was larger than the entire game after this deduplication run, so I'll be opting in to the Beta ASAP.
It's been almost a decade since I ran spinning rust in a desktop, and while I admire their efforts to support shitty hardware, who's playing this on a machine good enough to play but can't afford £60 for a basic SSD for their game storage?
HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs.
Let’s say you have UI textures that you always need, common player models and textures, the battle music, but world geometry and monsters change per stage.
Create an archive file (pak, wad, …) for each stage, duplicating UI, player and battle music assets into each archive. This makes it so that you fully utilize HDD pages (some small config file won’t fill 4kb filesystem pages or even the smaller disk sectors). All the data of one stage will be read into disk cache in one fell swoop as well.
On optical media like CDs one would even put some data closer to the middle or on the outer edge of the disc because the reading speed is different due to the linear velocity.
This is an optimization for bandwidth at the cost of size (which often wasn’t a problem because the medium wasn’t filled anyway)
> HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs.
HDDs also have to real with fragmentation, I wonder what the odds that you get to write 150 GBs (and then regular updates in the 30GB range) without breaking it into fragments...
The game installer can't control the layout on an HDD without doing some very questionable things like defragging and moving existing user files around the disk. It probably _could_ but the risk of irrecoverable user data loss or accidentally corrupting a boot partition via a bug would make it completely not worth it.
Even if you pack those, there's no guarantee they don't get fragmented by the filesystem.
CDs are different not because of media, but because of who owns the storage media layout.
It's less about ensuring perfect layout as it is about avoiding almost guaranteed terrible layout. Unless your filesystem is fully fragmented already it won't intentionally shuffle and split big files without a good reason.
Single large file is still more likely to be mostly sequential compared to 10000 tiny files. With large amount of individual files the file system is more likely to opportunistically use the small files for filling previously left holes. Individual files more or less guarantee that you will have to do multiple syscalls per each file and to open and read it, also potentially more amount of indirection and jumping around on the OS side to read the metadata of each individual file. Individual files also increases chance of accidentally introducing random seeks due to mismatch between the order updater writes files, the way file system orders things and the order in which level description files list and reads files.
You can, but on the other hand they've been battling bugs from it with every release. The game is notorious for breaking things constantly. I played for quite a while and the sound engine was always awful with things not in your line of sight frequently not making any noise at all, and every month or two a new major bug relating to host client desyncing is found out by the community who then has to have big campaigns badgering the devs to notice and fix it. Very fun game still but if they had started with a supported engine a lot of stuff would probably work way better
I did similar work on a game a long time ago and it took over a month to slim it down to 1/4 of the size but in this case 'at runtime' - the producer wasn't impressed. It looked exactly the same. I wonder if they had any pushback.
It was legit faster to delete and redownload this game than update it since steam considered my SSD too full (WITH 200 GIGS FREE) to download the files to said SSD, instead opting to use my SLOWEST HDD as the cache drive for the download.
It would then proceed to download the update in 5 minutes and spend 8 HOURS UPDATING.
A full download of the game? 10 minutes.
Glad to see this update. I hope more games follow suit
Did the duplicated files were even used on pc? Like, do you even have such low access to the file system that you can deduce which duplicated instance has a faster access time on a mechanical hard drive?
Both use the cyborg enemies, by duplicating the cyborg enemy model and texture data across both files, Only the level file needs to be opened to get all nessecary data for a match.
Because modern OS will allow you to preallocate contiguous segments and have auto defrag, you can have it read this level file at max speed, rather than having to stop and seek to go find cyborg.model file because it was referenced by the spawn pool. Engine limitations may prevent other optimisations you think up as a thought exercise after reading this.
It's similar to how crash bandicoot packed their level data to handle the slow speed of the ps1 disc drive.
As to why they had a HDD optimisation in 2024... Shrugs
> As to why they had a HDD optimisation in 2024... Shrugs
Sadly, Valve doesn't include/publish HDD vs SSD in/on their surveys (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=combined) but considering the most popular combo seems to be 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM, 2.3 Ghz to 2.69 Ghz CPU frequency, I'm getting the impression that the average gaming PC machine isn't actually that beefy. If someone told me the most common setup paired with the previous specs was a small SSD drive for the OS and a medium/large-sized HDD for everything else and I would have believed you.
I think us as (software/developer/technology) professionals with disposable income to spend on our hobbies forget how things are for the average person out there in the world.
Steam has so many users I'm not sure the average says a lot? If you are just playing Hentai games like most Steam users (j/k, probably) you can do that on any device from the last 10 years.
More interesting would be to see the specs for users who bought COD (add other popular franchises as you wish) in the last 2 years. That would at least trim the sample set to those who expect to play recent graphics heavy titles.
Not sure if this is what they did, but you can just put all the things you need together sequentially into a single file and rely on the filesystem to allocate contiguous blocks where possible (using the appropriate size hints to help). It's trivial unpack at loading time without any performance impact.
A filesystem is by itself just one big "file" acting like a file archive.
> "It's no surprise to see modern AAA games occupying hundreds of gigabytes of storage these days"
Is it not? I've genuinely never understood it!
I used to do a little bit of level building for IdTech3 games back in the day but it's been 20 years. I'm not totally ignorant of what's involved, just mostly ignorant. I really want to know though, what is all that data!? Textures?
In particular I find the massive disparity between decently similar games interesting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes something like 130gb on my Xbox, whereas Robocop: Rogue City takes something like 8gb. They have similar visual fidelity, I would say Robocop might have a little bit of a lead, but Indiana Jones has fancier dynamic lighting.
At 130gb though, I almost could have streamed my entire playthrough of the game at 4k and came out on top.
These days I am just assuming it is textures. Textures for graphic quality, that I don't need on my merely full HD screens. Makes me usually not even bother buying, let alone installing such a game. Even 23 GB is still tons. When I compare that with how much fun I can have playing games that focus on gameplay instead of graphics, I would rather safe money, than spending it and having to go through my files and delete things, because I need more space for a game.
Yes. High resolution textures take up a lot of space. Have a look at HD texture mods for skyrim for example. 23GB is more in line with a game from a few years ago, so this really is slim for a modern game with modern graphics.
> 3-D Hardware Accelerator (with 16MB VRAM with full OpenGL® support; Pentium® II 400 Mhz processor or Athlon® processor; English version of Windows® 2000/XP Operating System; 128 MB RAM; 16-bit high color video mode; 800 MB of uncompressed hard disk space for game files (Minimum Install), plus 300 MB for the Windows swap file […]
For gaming, this doesn't bother me much, given that, even at today's prices, the cost of maintaining a midrange gaming PC with ample storage and "recommended" specs for new releases is probably no more than $200-$300/year.
The ever-increasing system requirements of productivity software, however, never ceases to amaze me:
Acrobat Exchange 1.0 for Windows (1993) required 4 MB RAM and 6 MB free disk space.
Rough feature parity with the most-used features of modern Acrobat also required Acrobat Distiller, which required 8 MB RAM and another 10 MB or so of disk space.
Acrobat for Windows (2025) requires 2,000 MB RAM and 4,500 MB free disk space.
I for one simply cannot believe that a game with 4K+ textures and high poly count models is bigger than a game that uses billboard sprites which aren't even HD. Whatever could be the reason? A complete mystery...
In this day and age it's a gift to only be ~23GB.. I'm reminded of the old days when you literally didn't have the space so had to get creative, now any kind of space optimization isn't even considered.
I do love rich soundtracks with high quality compression, and textures that look crisp on 4k. And also games with 100+ hours of single-player campaign.
What if.. the management made a request to make the game take more space than the previous release?
So everyone could see just how much content there is and how much better everything is.
I mean, the developers cannot be that incompetent while being able to ship a high quality product.
I stopped playing CoD mainly because I was tired of juggling disk space to try to play it even casually. It's surprising to me that game publishers have ignored this as some checklist requirement to stay below.
> 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 with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time.”
It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!
I expect it's a story that'll never get told in enough detail to satisfy curiosity, but it certainly seems strange from the outside for this optimisation to be both possible and acceptable.
> 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 hook for 150GB of cloud storage per player this would have been solved immediately.
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 consumer SSD).
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.
> 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.
By their own industry data (https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394...), deduplication causes a 5x performance increase loading data from HDD. There's a reason so many games are huge, and it's not because they're mining your HDD for HDDCoin.
The "problem" is a feature. The "so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it" mindset suggests that they were simply too lazy to ever run fdupes over their install directory, which is simply not the case. The duplication was intentional, and is still intentional in many other games that could but likely won't apply the same data minimization.
I'll gladly take this update because considerable effort was spent on measuring the impact, but not one of those "everyone around me is so lazy, I'll just be the noble hero to sacrifice my time to deduplicate the game files" updates.
23 GiB can be cached entirely in RAM on higher end gaming rigs these days. 154 GiB probably does not fit into many player's RAM when you still want something left for the OS and game. Reducing how much needs to be loaded from slow storage is itself an I/O speedup and HDDs are not that bad at seeking that you need to go to extreme lengths to avoid it entirely. The only place where such duplication to ensure linear reads may be warranted is optical media.
They used "industry data" to make performance estimations: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394...
> These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not.
Instead of y'know, running their own game on a hdd.
It's literally "instead of profiling our own app we profiled competition's app and made decisions based on that".
But if I read it correctly (and I may be mistaken) in actual practice any improvement in load times was completely hidden by level generation that was happening in parallel, making this performance improvement not worth it, since it was hidden by the other process.
Which describes both the PS2, PS3, PS4, Dreamcast, GameCube, Wii, and Xbox 360. The PS4 had a 2.5" SATA slot but the idiots didn't hook it up to the chipsets existing SATA port, but added a slow USB2.0<->SATA chip. So since the sunset of the N64 all stationary gaming consoles have been held back by slow (optical) storage with even worse seek times.
Some many game design crimes have a storage limitation at their core e.g. levels that are just a few rooms connected by tunnels or elevators.
According to the post, "the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most."
It didn't help their game load noticeably faster. They just hadn't checked if the optimization actually helped.
The actual source (https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394...) says:
> Only a few seconds difference?
> Further good news: the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most. “Wait a minute,” I hear you ask - “didn’t you just tell us all that you duplicate data because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times worse?”. I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
> Now things are different. We have real measurements specific to our game instead of industry data. We now know that the true number of players actively playing HD2 on a mechanical HDD was around 11% during the last week (seems our estimates were not so bad after all). We now know that, contrary to most games, the majority of the loading time in HELLDIVERS 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs.
They measured first, accepted the minimal impact, and then changed their game.
But this means that before they blindly trusted some stats without actually testing how their game performed with and without it?
Yes, but I think maybe people in this thread are painting it unfairly? Another way to frame it is that they used industry best practices and their intuition to develop the game, then revisited their decisions to see if they still made sense. When they didn't, they updated the game. It's normal for any product to be imperfect on initial release. It's part of actually getting to market.
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.
> They’re not the ones bearing the cost.
I'm not sure that's necessarily true... Customers have limited space for games; it's a lot easier to justify keeping a 23GB game around for occasional play than it is for a 154GB game, so they likely lost some small fraction of their playerbase they could have retained.
That is a feature for franchise games like CoD.
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.
> I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements
I have to check. You're assumption is correct. I am one of very few.
I don't know the numbers and I'm gonna check in a sec but I'm wondering whether the suppliers (publishers or whoever is pinning the price) haven't screwed up big time by driving prices and requirements without thinking about the potential customers that they are going to scare away terminally. Theoretically, I have to assume that their sales teams account for these potentials but I've seen so much dumb shit in practice over the past 10 years that I have serious doubts that most of these suits are worth anything at all, given that grown up working class kids--with up to 400+ hours overtime per year, 1.3 kids on average and approx. -0.5 books and news read per any unit of time--can come up with the same big tech, big media, economic and political agendas as have been in practice in both parts of the world for the better part of our lives--if you play "game master" for half a weekend where you become best friends with all the kiosks in your proximity.
> the effect on their bottom line is negligible
Is it, though? My bold, exaggerated assumption is that they would have had 10% more sales AND players.
And the thing is, that at any point in time when I, and a few I know, had time and desire to play, we would have had to either clean up our drives or invest game price + sdd price for about 100 hours of fun over the course of months. We would have gladly licked blood but no industry promises can compensate for even more of our efforts than enough of us see and come up with at work. As a result, at least 5 buyers and players lost, and at work and elsewhere you hear, "yeah, I would, if I had some guys to play with" ...
Which goes to show, that they don't care about the user, but only about the user's money.
No - because most users also don't check install size on games, and unlike renting overpriced storage from a cloud provider, users paid a fixed price for storage up front and aren't getting price gouged nearly as badly. So it's a trade that makes sense.
Both entrants in the market are telling you that "install size isn't that important".
If you asked the player base of this game whether they'd prefer a smaller size, or more content - the vast majority would vote content.
If anything, I'd wager this decision was still driven by internal goals for the company, because producing a 154gb artifact and storing it for things like CI/CD are still quite expensive if you have a decent number of builds/engineers. Both in time and money.
154GB is A LOT still.
I mean.. A few years ago, 1TB SSDs were still the best buy and many people haven't ugpraded still, and wasthing 15% of your total storage on just one game is still a pain for many.
I started my career as a software performance engineer. We measured everything across different code implementations, multiple OS, hardware systems, and in various network configurations.
It was amazing how often people wanted to optimize stuff that wasn't a bottleneck in overall performance. Real bottlenecks were often easy to see when you measured and usually simple to fix.
But it was also tough work in the org. It was tedious, time-consuming, and involved a lot of experimental comp sci work. Plus, it was a cost center (teams had to give up some of their budget for perf engineering support) and even though we had racks and racks of gear for building and testing end-to-end systems, what most dev teams wanted from us was to give them all our scripts and measurement tools to "do it themselves" so they didn't have to give up the budget.
That sounds like fascinating work, but also kind of a case study in what a manager's role is to "clear the road" and handle the lion's share of that internal advocacy and politicking so that ICs don't have to deal with it.
It's because patting yourself on the back for getting 5x performance increase in microbenchmark feels good and looks good on yearly review.
> But it was also tough work in the org. It was tedious, time-consuming, and involved a lot of experimental comp sci work. Plus, it was a cost center (teams had to give up some of their budget for perf engineering support) and even though we had racks and racks of gear for building and testing end-to-end systems, what most dev teams wanted from us was to give them all our scripts and measurement tools to "do it themselves" so they didn't have to give up the budget.
Misaligned budgeting and goals is bane of good engineering. I've seen some absolutely stupid stuff like outsourcing hosting a simple site to us, because client would rather hire 3rd party to buy domain and put a simple site there (some advertising), than to deal with their own security guys and host it on their own infrastructure.
"It's a cost center" "So is fucking HR, why you don't fire them ?" "Uh, I'll ignore that, pls just invoice anything you do to other teams" ... "Hey, they bought cloud solution that doesn't work/they can't figure it out, can you help them" "But we HAVE stuff doing that cheaper and easier, why they didn't come to us" "Oh they thought cloud will be cheaper and just work after 5 min setup"
154GB was the product of massive asset duplication, as opposed 23GB being the product of an optimization miracle. :)
How did it get so bad on PC?
Well, it wasn't always so crazy. I remember it being reasonable closer to launch (almost 2 years ago) and more like ~40-60GB. Since then, the devs have been busy. There has been a LOT of reworking and a lot of new content, and the PC install size grew gradually rather than suddenly.
This was probably impacted to some extent by the discontinued game engine they're using. Bitsquid/Stingray was discontinued partway through HD2 development and they continued on with it rather than restarting production entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquid
11% still play HD2 with a spinning drive? I would've never guessed that. There's probably some vicious circle thing going on: because the install size is so big, people need to install it on their secondary, spinning drive...
Even though I have two SSDs in my main machine I still use a hard drive as an overflow for games that I judge are not SSD worthy.
Because it's a recent 20TB HDD the read speeds approach 250MB/s and I've also specifically partitioned it at the beginning of the disk just for games so that it can sustain full transfer speeds without files falling into the slower tracks, the rest of the disk is then partitioned for media files that won't care much for the speed loss. It's honestly fine for the vast majority of games.
> It's honestly fine for the vast majority of games.
Yes, because they apparently still duplicate data so that the terrible IOPS of spinning disks does not factor as much. You people need to stop with this so that we can all have smaller games again! ;-) <--- (IT'S A JOKE)
I install all my games on HDD but then use PrimoCache for RAM
https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/
PrimoCache is awesome, highly recommended. I’d only say to make sure your computer is rock stable before installing it, in my limited experience it exponentially increases the risk of filesystem corruption if your computer is unstable.
It is no surprise to me that people still have to use HDD for storage. SSD stopped getting bigger a decade plus ago.
SSD sizes are still only equal to the HDD sizes available and common in 2010 (a couple TB~). SSD size increases (availability+price decreases) for consumers form factors have entirely stopped. There is no more progress for SSD because quad level cells are as far as the charge trap tech can be pushed and most people no longer own computers. They have tablets or phones or if they have a laptop it has 256GB of storage and everything is done in the cloud or with an octopus of (small) externals.
I bought 4x (1TB->4TB the storage for half the price after my SSD died after 5 years (thanks samsung), what you mean they 'stopped being bigger'?
Sure, there is some limitation in format, can only shove so many chips on M.2, but you can get U.2 ones that are bigger than biggest HDD (tho price is pretty eye-watering)
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.
I think they were talking specifically about this game, which is only available on PS5 and PC.
Edit: Forgot it was released recently on Xbox Series consoles but those also have SSDs.
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.
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.
I don't find it surprising at all. A ton of developers do optimizations based on vibes and very rarely check if they're actually getting a real benefit from it.
This is the moral behind "premature optimization is the root of all evil" - you could say preconceived just as easily.
> you could say preconceived just as easily
Would have saved us from all the people who reject any sort of optimization work because for them it is always "too early" since some product team wanted their new feature in production yesterday, and users waiting 5 seconds for a page load isn't considered bad enough just yet.
Premature optimization doesn't mean "We have an obvious fix sitting in front of us that will definitely improve things."
It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway."
So it doesn't save us from anything, it potentially delays launching and gives us the same result that product team would have given us, but more expensive.
> It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway."
the problem is that it doesn't say that directly so people without experience take it at face value.
Honestly looking over time I think that phrase did more bad than good.
Yes, of course you shouldn't optimize before you get your critical path stable and benchmark which parts take too much.
But many, many times it is used as excuse to delay optimisation so far that it is now hard to do because it would require to rewriting parts that "work just fine", or it is skipped because the slowness is just at tolerable level.
I have a feeling just spending 10-20% more time on a piece of code to give it a glance whether it couldn't be more optimal would pay for itself very quickly compared to bigger rewrite months after code was written.
Counterpoint: data driven development often leads to optimizations like this not being made because they're not the ones who are affected, their customers are. And software market is weird this way - little barriers to entry, yet almost nothing is a commodity, so there's no competitive pressure to help here either.
Game companies these days barely optimize engine graphical performance before release never mind the package size or patching speed. They just stamp higher minimum system requirements on the package.
I'd bet any amount of money a demo ran slow on one stakeholder's computer, who happened to have a mechanical hard drive, they attributed the slowness to the hard drive without a real investigation and optimizing for mechanical hard drive performance became standard practice. The demo may not have even been for this game, just a case of once bitten twice shy.
it's not cost to them. The cost is paid by consumers and platforms.
Also if goal was to improve things for small minority they could've just pawned it off to free DLC, like how some games do with 4k texture packs
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.
Noting in particular that the PS5's internal storage isn't just "an ssd", it's a gen 4 drive that can sequential-read at up to 5500 MB/s.
By comparison a SATA III port caps out at 6Gbps (750 MB/s), and first generation NVMe drives ("gen 3") were limited to 3500 MB/s.
the speed is one thing but seek times are just orders of magnitude different too.
SSD on SATA is still "not bad" for most games, but HDD can be awful if game does not do much sequential
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
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.
You missed the most bizarre quote:
> These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns
Unfortunately it's not only game development, all modern society seems operate like this.
IIRC this has been the “done thing” forever. I’m not in game development, but I think I recall hearing about it in the Xbox 360 era. Conventional options are picked by default, benchmarks are needed to overturn that. Looking at my hard drive, massive game installations are still very much the industry standard…
From a business perspective the disk footprint is only a high cost if it results in fewer sales, which I doubt it does to any significant degree. It is wasteful, but can see why optimization efforts would get focused elsewhere.
I think certain games dont even bother to optimize the install size so that you cant fit other games on the hard drive, I think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs
Having a humongous game might be a competitive advantage in the era of live-service games.
Users might be more hesitant to switch to another game if it means uninstalling yours and reinstalling is a big pain in the backside due to long download times.
More likely once they uninstall it, they never reinstall it because they'd have to clear out so much other stuff to fit it back in.
I guess it's a lock-in effect of sorts.
I've often seen people mention that one reason for games like Call of Duty being so enormous is optimising for performance over storage. You'd rather decompress textures/audio files at install-time rather than during run-time, because you download/install so infrequently.
> I think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs
I looked up the size of the latest one, and Sony's investment in RAD Kraken seems to be paying dividends:
Xbox: 214 GB
PC: 162 GB
PS5: 96 GB
Also the cost is often offloaded to the "greedy" Valve... So there is less pressure to optimize their own CDN use.
Yeah, I don't think any of the stores charge developers in proportion to how much bandwidth they use. If that changed then the priorities could shift pretty quickly.
Publishers do have to care somewhat on the Switch since Nintendo does charge them more for higher capacity physical carts, but a lot of the time they just sidestep that by only putting part (or none) of the game on the cart and requiring the player to download the rest.
Given how many Steam games are bought but never even installed, it would seem not terribly worth optimizing for.
On phone, I bet you see some more effort.
Both things are sort of true. Its not sales where size can hurt you but retention, which is why it tended to matter more on phones. When you need space on your device the apps are listed from largest to smallest.
On both phones and PCs storage has just grown so its less of an issue. The one thing I have noticed is that Apple does its price windowing around memory so you pay an absurd amount for an extra 128 gb. The ultra competitive Chinese phone market crams high end phones with a ton of memory and battery. Si some popular Chinese phone games are huge compared to ones made for the iPhone.
It might but they have no way of measuring it so they won't take it into account.
Optimizing for disk space is very low on the priority list for pretty much every game, and this makes sense since its very low on the list of customer concerns relative to things like in-game performance, net code, tweaking game mechanics and balancing etc.
Apparently, in-game performance is not more important than pretty visuals. But that's based on hearsay / what I remember reading ages ago, I have no recent sources. The tl;dr was that apparently enough people are OK with a 30 fps game if the visuals are good.
I believe this led to a huge wave of 'laziness' in game development, where framerate wasn't too high up in the list of requirements. And it ended up in some games where neither graphics fidelity or frame rate was a priority (one of the recent Pokemon games... which is really disappointing for one of the biggest multimedia franchises of all time).
That used to be the case, but this current generation the vast majority of games have a 60 fps performance mode. On PS5 at least, I can't speak about other consoles.
High cost to who though. We see the same thing when it comes to RAM and CPU usage, the developer is not the one paying for the hardware and many gamers have shown that they will spend money on hardware to play a game they want.
Sure they may loose some sales but I have never seen many numbers on how much it really impacted sales.
Also on the disk side, I can't say I have ever looked at how much space is required for a game before buying it. If I need to clear out some stuff I will. Especially with it not being uncommon for a game to be in the 100gb realm already.
That all being said, I am actually surprised by the 11% using mechanical hard drives. I figured that NVME would be a lower percentage and many are using SSD's... but I figured the percent with machines capable of running modern games in the first place with mechanical drives would be far lower.
I do wonder how long it will be until we see games just saying they are not compatible with mechanical drives.
That already happened :) Starfield claimed to not support HDDs and really ran bad with them. And I think I saw SSDs as requirement for a few other games now, in the requirement listings on steam.
> Starfield claimed to not support HDDs and really ran bad with them.
To be fair, at launch Starfield had pretty shit loading times even with blazing fast SSDs, and the game has a lot of loading screens, so makes sense they'll nip that one in the bud and just say it's unsupported with the slower type of disks.
Latest Ratchet and Clank game relies heavily on ps5’s nvme drive. Its PC port states that SSD is required. And IIRC, the experience on mechanical drives is quite terrible to the unplayable level.
>It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!
You should look at COD install sizes and almost weekly ridiculously huge "updates". 150gb for a first install is almost generous considering most AAA games.
Twenty years ago I bought a 1TB harddrive... It wasn't very expensive either.
Twenty years on, and somehow that's still 'big'.
Computing progress disappoints me.
They say some kind of physical limit, but I think it's really market manipulation in order to bring about the cloud and centralization, control.
I think smaller game sizes would hurt sales. Your first though on a 23gb game when other games are 100 plus is, why is there so little content?
> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost
Wait till you find out what engine this game is made in. https://80.lv/articles/helldivers-ii-was-built-on-an-archaic...
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, the game studio externalised an eight-figure hardware cost onto their users, to avoid a five-to-six-figure engineering cost on their side.
Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam, because it's a legitimate optimisation in some cases. The only safeguard against this sort of waste is a company culture which values software quality. I'm glad the developers fixed this bug, but it should never have been released to users in the first place.
>Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam
Steam compresses games as much as possible, so in the case of Helldivers 2, you had to download between ~30 and ~40 GB, which was then unpacked to 150 GB (according to SteamDB[0])
[0] https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/
You are missing that each update takes AGES while it tortures your disk for patching the files (on my machine it takes 15min or so, and that's on an SSD). So I agree that this is careless and reminds me of the GTA5 startup time that was fixed by a dedicated player who finally had enough and reverse engineered the problem (see https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...). I still find these things hard to accept.
Steam update durations depend on compression + CPU performance + SSD I/O. Things will be harder when the disk is almost full and live defragmentation kicks in to get free space for contiguous files. Some SSDs are fast enough to keep up with such a load, but a lot of them will quickly hit their DRAM limits and suddenly that advertised gigabyte per second write speed isn't all that fast. Bonus points for when your SSD doesn't have a heatsink and moving air over it, making the controller throttle hard.
Patching 150GiB with a compressed 15GiB download just takes a lot of I/O. The alternative is downloading a fresh copy of the 150GiB install file, but those playing on DSL will probably let their SSD whizz a few minutes longer than spend another day downloading updates.
If your SSD is slower than your internet capacity, deleting install files and re-downloading the entire game will probably save you some time.
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 have asked the game studio to look into it.
This article presents it as a big success, but it could be read the opposite way: "Developers of Helldivers 2 wasted 130 GB for years and didn't care because it was others people computers"
> 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 peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit), and you could quite easily build a server that would push 100Gb/s of static objects for under $10k a pop.
It would surprise me if the total additional costs were over $1M, considering they already have their own CDN setup. One of the big cloud vendors would charge $100M just for the bandwidth, let alone the infrastructure to serve it, based on some quick calculation I've done (probably incorrectly) -- though interestingly, HN's fave non-cloud vendor Hetzner would only charge $2M :P
Isn't it a little reductive to look at basic infrastructure costs? I used Hetzner as a surrogate for the raw cost of bandwidth, plus overheads. If you need to serve data outside Europe, the budget tier of BunnyCDN is four times more expensive than Hetzner.
But you might be right - in a market where the price of the same good varies by two orders of magnitude, I could believe that even the nice vendors are charging a 400% markup.
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.
Makes sense, initial claim was that HD2 size was mainly because of duplicated assets, and any compression worth it's salt would de-duplicate things effectively.
> the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month
Out of curiousity, how do you come up with a number for this? I would have zero idea of how to even start estimating such a thing, or even being able to tell you whether "marginal cost of wasted hard drive storage" is even a thing for consumers.
From the story:
> Originally, the game’s large install size was attributed to optimization for mechanical hard drives since duplicating data is used to reduce loading times on older storage media. However, it turns out that Arrowhead’s estimates for load times on HDDs, based on industry data, were incorrect.
It wasn't a bug. They made a decision on what to optimise which was based on incomplete / incorrect data and performed the wrong optimisation as a result.
As a player of the game, I didn't really care that it took up so much space on my PC. I have 2TB dedicated for gaming.
Why not offer 2 versions for download and let the user choose, whether they want to block their whole disk with a single game, or accept a bit longer loading times? Or let the user at installation time make an informed decision by explaining the supposed optimization? Or let the user decide before downloading, what resolution (ergo textures) they want as the highest resolution they will play the game at and only download the textures they need up to that resolution?
Questions, questions, questions.
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SSD or HDD?
SSD. Prices got reasonable sometime last year for 2TB NVME/SSD
> the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month
Where are you getting this number from? Not necessarily arguing with it, just curious.
I should probably look up the company that made the game or the publisher and avoid games they make in the future.
That would be a shame because the game is honestly very good despite its flaws, is a lot of fun and has a decent community.
I recently downloaded Hunt showdown. I think it was around 70 gigs. About a month later, I had to update it. The download was the same size. I think they literally just overrode the entire game because they were too lazy to update it properly.
I observed this too with some other games. Really annoying, when you need to redownload tens of gigabytes , because they cannot be arsed to put a proper updater. Things that were solved by most games way before Steam became even big.
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Possibly a similar process to when you go into an AWS account, and find dozens of orphaned VMs, a few thousand orphaned disk volumes, etc., saving like $10k/month just deleting unused resources.
It's not a case of forgotten data, it's duplicated for access time reasons, like with optical media.
It follows in the footsteps of trading in storage for less compute and/or better performance.
An opposite approach in the form of a mod for Monster Hunter: Wilds recently made it possible [0] for end-users to decompress all the game textures ahead of time. This was beneficial there, because GPU decompression was causing stalls, and the trading in of compute for less storage resulted in significantly worse performance.
[0] https://youtu.be/AOxLV2US4Ac
We've all been there Jeff.
In this case, I don't think it was forgetfulness; unlike us, they have an excuse and they were trying to optimise for disk seek times.
Anyway, I've got a half-dozen cloud accounts I need to go check for unused resources waves.
I've been really curious precisely what changed, and what sort of optimization might have been involved here.
Because offhand, I know you could do things like cute optimizations of redundant data to minimize seek time on optical media, but with HDDs, you get no promises about layout to optimize around...
The only thing I can think of is if it was literally something as inane as checking the "store deduplicated by hash" option in the build, on a tree with copies of assets scattered everywhere, and it was just nobody had ever checked if the fear around the option was based on outcomes.
(I know they said in the original blog post that it was based around fears of client performance impact, but the whole reason I'm staring at that is that if it's just a deduplication table at storage time, the client shouldn't...care? It's not writing to the game data archives, it's just looking stuff up either way...)
I'm not entirely clear what you're trying to say, but, my understanding is that they simply put lots of copies of files in lots of places like games have done for a long time, in the hopes it would lower seek times on HDDs for those players who use them.
They realised, after a lot of players asking, that it wasn't necessary, and probably had less of an impact than they thought.
They removed the duplicates, and drastically cut the install size. I updated last night, and the update alone was larger than the entire game after this deduplication run, so I'll be opting in to the Beta ASAP.
It's been almost a decade since I ran spinning rust in a desktop, and while I admire their efforts to support shitty hardware, who's playing this on a machine good enough to play but can't afford £60 for a basic SSD for their game storage?
HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs.
Let’s say you have UI textures that you always need, common player models and textures, the battle music, but world geometry and monsters change per stage. Create an archive file (pak, wad, …) for each stage, duplicating UI, player and battle music assets into each archive. This makes it so that you fully utilize HDD pages (some small config file won’t fill 4kb filesystem pages or even the smaller disk sectors). All the data of one stage will be read into disk cache in one fell swoop as well.
On optical media like CDs one would even put some data closer to the middle or on the outer edge of the disc because the reading speed is different due to the linear velocity.
This is an optimization for bandwidth at the cost of size (which often wasn’t a problem because the medium wasn’t filled anyway)
> HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs.
HDDs also have to real with fragmentation, I wonder what the odds that you get to write 150 GBs (and then regular updates in the 30GB range) without breaking it into fragments...
The game installer can't control the layout on an HDD without doing some very questionable things like defragging and moving existing user files around the disk. It probably _could_ but the risk of irrecoverable user data loss or accidentally corrupting a boot partition via a bug would make it completely not worth it.
Even if you pack those, there's no guarantee they don't get fragmented by the filesystem.
CDs are different not because of media, but because of who owns the storage media layout.
It's less about ensuring perfect layout as it is about avoiding almost guaranteed terrible layout. Unless your filesystem is fully fragmented already it won't intentionally shuffle and split big files without a good reason.
Single large file is still more likely to be mostly sequential compared to 10000 tiny files. With large amount of individual files the file system is more likely to opportunistically use the small files for filling previously left holes. Individual files more or less guarantee that you will have to do multiple syscalls per each file and to open and read it, also potentially more amount of indirection and jumping around on the OS side to read the metadata of each individual file. Individual files also increases chance of accidentally introducing random seeks due to mismatch between the order updater writes files, the way file system orders things and the order in which level description files list and reads files.
AFAIK Helldivers 2 runs some really old engine which was discontinued many years ago. Not "state of the art."
It's also a title that shows you can have a really good game without the latest tech.
You can, but on the other hand they've been battling bugs from it with every release. The game is notorious for breaking things constantly. I played for quite a while and the sound engine was always awful with things not in your line of sight frequently not making any noise at all, and every month or two a new major bug relating to host client desyncing is found out by the community who then has to have big campaigns badgering the devs to notice and fix it. Very fun game still but if they had started with a supported engine a lot of stuff would probably work way better
I did similar work on a game a long time ago and it took over a month to slim it down to 1/4 of the size but in this case 'at runtime' - the producer wasn't impressed. It looked exactly the same. I wonder if they had any pushback.
On size limited platforms like steam deck and friends this is a huge W
It was legit faster to delete and redownload this game than update it since steam considered my SSD too full (WITH 200 GIGS FREE) to download the files to said SSD, instead opting to use my SLOWEST HDD as the cache drive for the download.
It would then proceed to download the update in 5 minutes and spend 8 HOURS UPDATING.
A full download of the game? 10 minutes.
Glad to see this update. I hope more games follow suit
Did the duplicated files were even used on pc? Like, do you even have such low access to the file system that you can deduce which duplicated instance has a faster access time on a mechanical hard drive?
It's not which duplicated instance....
Think of it as I have two packs for levels.
Creek.level and roboplanet.level
Both use the cyborg enemies, by duplicating the cyborg enemy model and texture data across both files, Only the level file needs to be opened to get all nessecary data for a match.
Because modern OS will allow you to preallocate contiguous segments and have auto defrag, you can have it read this level file at max speed, rather than having to stop and seek to go find cyborg.model file because it was referenced by the spawn pool. Engine limitations may prevent other optimisations you think up as a thought exercise after reading this.
It's similar to how crash bandicoot packed their level data to handle the slow speed of the ps1 disc drive.
As to why they had a HDD optimisation in 2024... Shrugs
> As to why they had a HDD optimisation in 2024... Shrugs
Sadly, Valve doesn't include/publish HDD vs SSD in/on their surveys (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=combined) but considering the most popular combo seems to be 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM, 2.3 Ghz to 2.69 Ghz CPU frequency, I'm getting the impression that the average gaming PC machine isn't actually that beefy. If someone told me the most common setup paired with the previous specs was a small SSD drive for the OS and a medium/large-sized HDD for everything else and I would have believed you.
I think us as (software/developer/technology) professionals with disposable income to spend on our hobbies forget how things are for the average person out there in the world.
Steam has so many users I'm not sure the average says a lot? If you are just playing Hentai games like most Steam users (j/k, probably) you can do that on any device from the last 10 years.
More interesting would be to see the specs for users who bought COD (add other popular franchises as you wish) in the last 2 years. That would at least trim the sample set to those who expect to play recent graphics heavy titles.
Not sure if this is what they did, but you can just put all the things you need together sequentially into a single file and rely on the filesystem to allocate contiguous blocks where possible (using the appropriate size hints to help). It's trivial unpack at loading time without any performance impact.
A filesystem is by itself just one big "file" acting like a file archive.
if your game takes 154 GB of space, you should never be able to touch a computer ever again.
Warframe also did this relatively recently, though perhaps not quite as aggressive a reduction as Helldivers, but still.
https://www.pcgamer.com/call-of-duty-take-note-warframe-is-r...
> "It's no surprise to see modern AAA games occupying hundreds of gigabytes of storage these days"
Is it not? I've genuinely never understood it!
I used to do a little bit of level building for IdTech3 games back in the day but it's been 20 years. I'm not totally ignorant of what's involved, just mostly ignorant. I really want to know though, what is all that data!? Textures?
In particular I find the massive disparity between decently similar games interesting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes something like 130gb on my Xbox, whereas Robocop: Rogue City takes something like 8gb. They have similar visual fidelity, I would say Robocop might have a little bit of a lead, but Indiana Jones has fancier dynamic lighting.
At 130gb though, I almost could have streamed my entire playthrough of the game at 4k and came out on top.
These days I am just assuming it is textures. Textures for graphic quality, that I don't need on my merely full HD screens. Makes me usually not even bother buying, let alone installing such a game. Even 23 GB is still tons. When I compare that with how much fun I can have playing games that focus on gameplay instead of graphics, I would rather safe money, than spending it and having to go through my files and delete things, because I need more space for a game.
23GB is supposed to be "slim"?!
Yes. High resolution textures take up a lot of space. Have a look at HD texture mods for skyrim for example. 23GB is more in line with a game from a few years ago, so this really is slim for a modern game with modern graphics.
Back in the day:
> 3-D Hardware Accelerator (with 16MB VRAM with full OpenGL® support; Pentium® II 400 Mhz processor or Athlon® processor; English version of Windows® 2000/XP Operating System; 128 MB RAM; 16-bit high color video mode; 800 MB of uncompressed hard disk space for game files (Minimum Install), plus 300 MB for the Windows swap file […]
* https://store.steampowered.com/app/9010/Return_to_Castle_Wol...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein
Even older games would be even smaller:
* https://www.oldgames.sk/en/game/ultima-vi-the-false-prophet/...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_VI:_The_False_Prophet
For gaming, this doesn't bother me much, given that, even at today's prices, the cost of maintaining a midrange gaming PC with ample storage and "recommended" specs for new releases is probably no more than $200-$300/year.
The ever-increasing system requirements of productivity software, however, never ceases to amaze me:
Acrobat Exchange 1.0 for Windows (1993) required 4 MB RAM and 6 MB free disk space.
Rough feature parity with the most-used features of modern Acrobat also required Acrobat Distiller, which required 8 MB RAM and another 10 MB or so of disk space.
Acrobat for Windows (2025) requires 2,000 MB RAM and 4,500 MB free disk space.
I for one simply cannot believe that a game with 4K+ textures and high poly count models is bigger than a game that uses billboard sprites which aren't even HD. Whatever could be the reason? A complete mystery...
It's tiny, compared to most games of similar graphical detail.
In this day and age it's a gift to only be ~23GB.. I'm reminded of the old days when you literally didn't have the space so had to get creative, now any kind of space optimization isn't even considered.
Not true at all on my PlayStation. Just a few games with 100GB+ install size can quickly put you into a space juggling scenario.
Have you played a big budget video game released in the last 10 years? It’s pretty standard to reach upwards of 60GB.
GTAV had a 60GB install size over a decade ago.
It can fit on a standard blu ray, so I'm inclined to say so
I do love rich soundtracks with high quality compression, and textures that look crisp on 4k. And also games with 100+ hours of single-player campaign.
I mean yes, it's a very nice looking game with fairly sizeable worlds and lots of different enemies, biomes, etc.
It's currently over 100GB because of duplicated assets, so this is a game-changer (pun intended).
EDIT: Just checked; 157GB on my SSD.
EDIT2: 26GB after updating with a 9.7GB download, 5.18GB of shaders before and after.
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What if.. the management made a request to make the game take more space than the previous release? So everyone could see just how much content there is and how much better everything is.
I mean, the developers cannot be that incompetent while being able to ship a high quality product.
Devs went full fitgirl (repack site which reduces sizes of cracked releases significantly via similar approaches)
Source: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131518)
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131518
Never a dupe when you say it is. You need another word.
In other news - "Call of Duty installer now takes additional 131GB of space on the disk"
I stopped playing CoD mainly because I was tired of juggling disk space to try to play it even casually. It's surprising to me that game publishers have ignored this as some checklist requirement to stay below.
Now all they need to do is remove the kernel-level anti-cheat