Enjoying your time with the latest Marvel Rivals character, The Hood? Well, if you are then I’ve got a double dose of good news for you (and if you aren’t then my condolences I hope this makes your day slightly better)! A texture compression patch should be out today that squeezes every last drop of performance out of our old machines, and decreases the massive size of Marvel Rivals by 40GB on PC and 15GB on console!
‼️ UPDATE: 40 GB FILESIZE REDUCTION
A massive texture compression overhaul is coming to #MarvelRivals with the Season 9.5 update this Friday, August 7th, which will decrease the game’s filesize by 40 GB on PC and 15 GB on console. pic.twitter.com/2ZZOkGrG88
— Miller Ross (@mmmmmmmmiller) August 4, 2026
This is actually huge, not just for Rivals itself, but for the industry at large. Last time this was done was Arrowhead massively shrinking down the storage size of Helldivers 2 providing us with “slim” version of that game, something that has since just become the normal size for that game. NetEase is looking to follow their example, and with two games as big as these getting some slimming down hopefully this becomes a standard demand across the industry.
The gaming industry has a plethora of troubles, it’s true, but one annoying thing that always seems to slip out of the room every time complaints about RAM prices and performance are brought up is the sheer amount of space these games can take up. A 500GB drive would only afford you the room for maybe 4 modern AAA games, 5 if one of them was an older game. 100GB is the industry standard for many games and as time goes on that number is likely to only increase, Lord knows how big a game like Grand Theft Auto 6 will end up being.
So, an overall industry-wide reexamination of how to optimize file size would be nice and maybe one day that’ll come, but for now it’s cool that we can get at least a few big name games to lead the charge into a brighter, more space efficient future.