In December last year trouble flared up between Spintires creator Pavel Zagrebelnyj and the game’s UK publisher Oovee, with Zagrebelnyj accusing the company of taking the money earned from initial sales and running, preventing continued development.
Fortunately it seems like the off-road trucker sim might be back on track at last. In a recent website post Oovee admits that it’s not done the best job in terms of communication, and pledges to improve its handling of the game.
”We openly admit that communications between Oovee and our customers have been weak over the last few months,” admits Oovee’s Tony Fellas. ”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.”
We are changing the way we work, for good! Oovee is now being streamlined and the way we work is much more structured, and that’s thanks to the recent team meeting we had from both sides of the pond. Another team meeting is scheduled for March which we will discuss internally more of what is said below, plus other things.
Fellas says that the company’s relationship with ”programming god” Zagrebelnyj has now been settled, and promises to improve its translation on social media when making statements or posts. ”Communication will be synchronised,” Fellas claims.
Finally, he reveals that the company is working on a new two-stage testing and QA programme, with an initial period of internal testing followed by a larger scale test conducted by a ”group of selected people with a wide variety of computer configurations.”
Fellas reveals that Spintires will receive updates once per month from now on, with the next big one planned for April, adding mod support to the game. There’s also apparently going to be some DLC for the game this Summer, though Oovee isn’t revealing what exactly that might consist of.
I don’t imagine all the issues with Spintires development will be magically washed away, but at least the situation seems more positive now than it did last year. We’ll keep an eye out for any further updates.
