Spintires is back on track

Spintires is very much a niche game. It's about driving rough, rugged, Soviet-era vehicles through mud deep enough to drown a giraffe. And that's really about it. Even so, it found enough of an audience to sell 100,000 copies in relatively short order, making it a legitimate indie hit, but things seemed to turn sour late last year when developer Pavel Zagrebelnyj said publisher Oovee had made off with the money and frozen him out of his own creation.

But in a statement posted today, Tony Fellas of Oovees blamed most of the trouble on "communications issues," with both customers and Zagrebelnyj, which have now been cleared up. "We openly admit that communications between Oovee and our customers have been weak over the last few months. Our customer base grew far beyond what we initially expected and we needed to cater for that quickly—the development plans became sketchy and before we knew it we had a runaway train. Please accept our apologies," he wrote.

"How can we possibly talk about the next iteration of Spintires when we still haven’t finished improving the current version of Spintires? Well to be fair, software is never finished and we understand that. But with the huge success of the Spintires release, it’s kind of a no-brainer but to continue the franchise and create an even better game with a larger team and a larger budget," Fellas wrote. "So with great pleasure we can confirm that planning has commenced for the next iteration of Spintires, whatever form it may come in."

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.