Marvel Rivals Cuts 40GB: A Win for Small SSD Owners

Storage has quietly become one of the most expensive parts of gaming, and almost nobody plans for it. You budget for the console or the graphics card, and then you discover that four games have eaten a 1TB drive and you’re playing an uninstall-reinstall shell game every weekend.

According to Eurogamer, Marvel Rivals’ next update will substantially reduce the game’s install footprint across PC and console — Video Games Chronicle reported the figure at up to 40GB. Eurogamer framed it well: with storage and memory costs climbing, it’s genuinely refreshing to see a game make a serious effort to shrink rather than swell.

I’d go further. I think this deserves to be a much bigger story than it is, and I want to explain why — plus what you can do to reclaim space regardless of which games you play.

Why games got so large in the first place

It’s worth understanding the cause, because it wasn’t laziness so much as a series of individually reasonable decisions.

• Uncompressed audio for every supported language, shipped to everyone
• Duplicated assets placed deliberately to reduce load times on mechanical hard drives
• High-resolution textures bundled at maximum quality regardless of your display
• Legacy content from past seasons kept installed in case you might need it

The mechanical-drive duplication trick is the interesting one. For years, copying the same asset into multiple places on disk was a legitimate optimisation — it reduced seek time. On an SSD, that logic evaporates entirely, but the practice lingered in engines and pipelines long after the hardware changed.

A 40GB reduction of the scale being described usually means a studio has gone back and genuinely re-examined those assumptions rather than shaving a few textures.

My take: this should be a competitive differentiator

Here’s the argument I’d make to any publisher paying attention.

Install size is a purchase decision. When a player with a nearly full drive picks between two live-service games, the one that doesn’t force an uninstall of something they love has a real advantage. That’s not a nice-to-have; that’s conversion.

It’s also a retention issue. Every gigabyte is friction on the return trip. A lapsed player who thinks about reinstalling, sees a 140GB download, and closes the store page is a player you lost to file size rather than to gameplay. Shrinking the install makes coming back cheap, and for a live-service game, cheap re-entry is everything.

There’s a fairness dimension too. Large installs disproportionately hurt people on slower connections, metered data, and base-model consoles — which is to say, the people least able to solve the problem by buying more storage. Trimming 40GB helps them the most.

How to reclaim storage right now

Regardless of what any single studio does, some habits that genuinely help:

On PC:

• Check for optional high-resolution texture packs you can uninstall separately
• Remove language packs you don’t use — often several gigabytes each
• Clear shader caches periodically; they regenerate as needed
• Use your platform’s storage analysis tool before guessing what’s big

On console:

• Delete installed campaign or multiplayer modules separately where supported
• Move rarely played titles to external drives instead of deleting them outright
• Clear saved video clips and screenshots, which accumulate invisibly

Our guide to freeing up hundreds of gigabytes with game compression goes deeper on the PC side, and if you’re on constrained hardware generally, Windows 11 optimization for 8GB budget laptops covers adjacent ground.

Pros and cons of the shrink

Pros:

• Up to 40GB reclaimed without deleting anything you own
• Faster reinstalls and patches for returning players
• Meaningfully easier on base-model consoles with modest drives
• Lower bandwidth burden for metered or slow connections
• Sets a precedent other live-service titles may feel pressure to follow

Cons:

• The update itself will require a large download to apply the change
• Aggressive compression can, in some engines, marginally increase CPU load during streaming
• One-off reductions don’t solve the long-term trend if seasonal content keeps stacking up
• Exact savings will vary by platform and installed components

Who benefits most

Biggest winners: Anyone on a base-storage console or a 1TB PC drive that’s perpetually at 95% capacity. This is free space you didn’t have to negotiate for, and for a game you were presumably keeping installed anyway.

Solid win: Players on slow or capped internet. Smaller future patches compound over a season.

Marginal: If you have a 4TB drive and no storage anxiety, this changes nothing about your day. It’s still worth applauding as a direction for the industry.

The verdict

This is the kind of update that generates no trailers and wins no awards, and it improves more people’s daily experience than most content drops. Reclaiming up to 40GB without asking the player to give anything up is a straightforwardly good outcome.

I’d like to see the rest of the live-service field treat install size as a feature they compete on. Marvel Rivals just made that argument more credible — and if the trend catches on, everyone with a full drive comes out ahead.

Sources

• Source: Eurogamer
• Source: Video Games Chronicle