Half-Life 2 preload delayed until Monday

The Half-Life 2 preload has been set back again according to a forum post purporting to be from Valve Software project manager Erik Johnson.

Valve plans to start uploading various assets for the game over its content delivery service Steam ahead of the game's expected September launch - specifically art assets and other static content that won't need to be changed between now and the game's submission to publisher Vivendi-Universal Games.

That process had been set to start on August 18th according to CEO Gabe Newell, and was then set back until yesterday, August 19th, in order for the developer to distribute a benchmark tool that would establish whether the highly anticipated FPS would run on gamers' hardware configurations.

Now though it seems the preload won't begin until Monday August 23rd. Speaking on Shacknews, Johnson said: "We're going to push the start of the preload back until this coming Monday. The main reason was to get out the release (that just happened) to the CS: Source Beta."

Valve has yet to confirm that the post was genuinely from Johnson, but given that we've had Steam running all night and there's been nary a trickle of new content, we're willing to bet it is.