Marvel Rivals Is About To Give Your SSD Some Much-Needed Breathing Room

It looks like Marvel Rivals has been playing around with Pym Particles, as it’s set to get much smaller on PC and console. As part of an update that will add super-evil supervillain manager The Hood to the game, developer NetEase announced that it has managed to shrink the install size by a considerable margin on PC and console.

According to the studio, a “massive texture compression overhaul” will see Marvel Rivals scale back by 40GB on PC, while PS5 and Xbox players will see the game reduced by up to 15GB. The current PC install size alone is 124GB, so this is quite the downsizing.

Creative director Guangyun Chen added in a developer update that all of this is being done without any compromise to the stylized graphics, although the update will require you to redownload the game–at least it won’t be a big download, this time around.

This news also comes at a time when gamers are being hammered by the rising cost of components, thanks to AI data centers eating up all the supply. The cost of RAM has skyrocketed, and so has the price for SSDs thanks to a severe global shortage of NAND flash memory chips. At the same time, games have been steadily increasing in size over the years thanks to high-resolution textures and uncompressed audio, and it’s not uncommon for the average gaming PC to have multiple SSDs installed. This used to be an affordable upgrade, but with current SSD prices, many cash-strapped gamers don’t have that luxury.

Marvel Rivals is also preparing for the arrival of Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday later this year, as it has been dropping new limited-time modes based on previous MCU Avengers movies every few months. So far, it has celebrated Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, and this month will see an Avengers: Infinity War-themed mode launch. Following that, players can prepare for some Avengers: Endgame vibes in October, and December will see the Path to Doomsday conclude with an Avengers: Doomsday-themed mode.

The very first Hot Toys figure inspired by Marvel Rivals was also recently announced, and it’s a stunning recreation of the K-pop superhero Luna Snow that you can add to your collection–if you have $280 to spare.