Does installing games on an SSD improve performance?

Yeah. I know it’s better to install Windows on the SSD because the system boots faster and all that. That’s very noticeable. But what about games?

Right now I have a 2 TB HDD and a 500 GB SSD, and that’s all I could afford. There’s a price difference between the two and every MB I put on the SSD is very precious. Today’s games are really heavy. Have you seen how big Ark: Survival Evolved is? 400 GB by itself if you include DLCs, maps, etc… On my humble SSD, buddy, pretty much only it would fit.

But the question is: what advantage would I actually get? Would the game just open faster or is there something else?