Nier: Automata has suddenly become one of the most demanding games on Steam, at least as far as your SSD is concerned. A small update that does nothing more than add three languages has pushed the game’s install size from roughly 50GB to more than 366GB, and so far Square Enix has only confirmed that it is looking into the problem.
The patch notes, posted to the game’s Steam news hub on 5 November under the plain heading “Update Content”, list Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Korean as the only additions. The note itself dates the release as “November 6th, 2026”, which is Japanese time. Nothing in it hints at new content, remastered assets or anything else that might explain a sevenfold jump in size.
The base game appears to be bundled with every DLC
GamesRadar+ tested it directly by reinstalling the game through Steam and was told it needed 366.56GB of free space. The same report notes that players who already had the game installed saw a patch download of around 8GB, which is still a lot for three text languages but nowhere near the figure facing anyone starting from scratch.
The likeliest cause is a packaging error rather than anything intentional. According to TheGamer, “the update has accidentally added the base game’s files to all of Nier’s DLCs”, which would mean the full game is effectively being downloaded once for each add-on a player owns. That fits with the numbers: a 50GB game copied across a handful of content packs lands in exactly this sort of territory.
The Steam store page has not caught up either. When we checked on Friday, the listed PC requirements still asked for “50 GB available space”, so anyone buying the game today would have no warning until Steam tells them how much room the download actually needs.
No fix yet
There has been no follow-up post on the Steam news hub since the language update went live. The only official word so far came from the Japanese NieR account in the early hours of Friday. In Japanese, it said the team is aware that the Steam version asks for more storage than expected when installing after the latest update, that it is investigating the cause and working on a response, and it apologised for the inconvenience. Developer PlatinumGames has not commented.
The Steam discussion board, meanwhile, has filled up with threads from confused and frustrated owners.
It is an awkward look for a port with history. Nier: Automata launched on Steam in March 2017 and waited four years for an official patch to address its performance and resolution problems, during which time fan mods did most of the heavy lifting. Owners hoping for a quick turnaround this time will be watching the update feed closely.
What to do in the meantime
If the game is already installed and working, the safest option is to leave it alone rather than verify or reinstall, since a fresh download is where the 366GB requirement bites. Anyone planning to pick it up for the first time, or to move it to a new drive, may want to wait until Square Enix pushes a corrected build. Even 50GB is a meaningful chunk of a smaller NVMe drive, as our guide to building a gaming PC points out when it comes to choosing storage.
It is also a reminder that updates on Steam are largely left to publishers to package correctly. Valve’s own checks focus on pre-release builds, a process that is currently taking up to 12 business days, and they are not designed to catch a patch for a nine-year-old game that quietly multiplies its own footprint.
