Helldivers 2 Performance at Risk as Arrowhead Grapples with Mounting Tech Debt Ahead of New Content

Helldivers 2 is the classic be careful-what-you-wish-for story: the game blew up, and so did the headaches. As 2025 winds down, Arrowhead is saying it plainly. The problem isn’t ideas or player interest. It’s technical debt and performance, and those issues won’t vanish just because the next content drop hits.

How we got here

Arrowhead admits the game grew far beyond its original plan. It started smaller and morphed into a multi-platform live service behemoth, and the original foundations weren’t built for that scale. In a new episode of the studio’s Democratic Conversation series, COO Johan Pilestedt explained that the push to ship frequent updates, add new features, and support multiple platforms has piled up technical debt faster than the team can pay it down. He also noted that a few months of engineering work feels like an eternity to players waiting for new toys, which doesn’t help the pace.

CEO Shams Jorjani has been blunt all year about how heavy the tech burden has become.

'Helldivers 2’s technical debt is crippling.'

Stacking new systems on top of old ones has kept the galactic war moving, but it’s also made the game shakier. Since mid-2025, players have noticed more instability, crashes, and performance drops. The studio says no one external is forcing the tempo; Sony is fine with slowing down. The hard part is balancing community expectations, content cadence, and the fact that not everyone on the team can jump in on performance work.

The one big, very nerdy win: 154GB down to 23GB

Not all the news has been grim. In early December 2025, Arrowhead rolled out an optional PC beta that shrank the install from roughly 154GB to about 23GB. The culprit was surprisingly old-school: the game had a lot of duplicated assets to help players still running mechanical hard drives. By de-duplicating those assets, they slashed the footprint by around 85 percent with no functional differences between versions. It’s a deeply technical fix, but the kind of thing that actually moves the needle. Naturally, players on social media held it up as proof that big games don’t have to eat 100GB-plus.

The flip side: size is the easy win. Performance and stability take far more time, testing, and engineering firepower, which directly competes with building new content.

What Arrowhead is doing now

• Slowing the content pace and moving to biweekly patch cycles focused on critical bugs.
• Treating every update as a health update first, even if it also includes new content.
• Owning the reality that years of accumulated technical debt won’t disappear in a patch or two.
• Reiterating that Sony isn’t pushing them to rush, but expectations from a very active community still add pressure.

The rub

This is the live-service paradox in plain sight: every shiny new feature adds weight to a codebase that wasn’t built to carry it forever. The file-size win proves Arrowhead can land big technical fixes when they focus on them, but real performance and stability gains will take time. In the meantime, expect slower content, more maintenance, and the occasional bump in the road. How long players will tolerate that trade-off is the million-credit question. Sound off below.