What a weird, wild story this has been. We reported that that the developer, Pavel Zagrebelnyj, was accused of deliberately creating game-crashing ”time bombs” in retaliation for a lack of payment from his publisher, Oovee. Now it sounds like that’s not the case.
In the midst of the controversy, the game was pulled from Steam, but it’s now back online with a patch that promises to have fixed all those previous game-breakers. In an exchange with PC Gamer, Zagrebelnyj said ”I did not do anything to make the game malfunction intentionally. Programming is a tricky business and everybody creates bugs—the problem is, that one was a critical bug that wasn’t fixed in time.”
In an interview with Eurogamer, he added ”I would never do something that would affect the gamers! In fact I do my best to make sure the game only brings joy to whoever plays it.”
Oovee themselves say ”In the next few days we will release a full and frank statement regarding the cause of the problem and how we plan to avoid this happening again, as well as details of the next update we have been working on since the start of 2016 which we plan to start testing next week.” They added in another statement to Eurogamer “We are aware of recent press speculation relating to sabotage of the Spintires game by the lead developer Pavel. We wish to express our displeasure at this speculation and totally refute these and other recent allegations. It is a shame that some press are reporting this without talking to us, and even saying in some articles they are yet to talk to us.”
Whether or not the crashes in question were intentional the relationship between developer and publisher a certainly strained, and the community is right to be skeptical of their ability to continue supporting their product.
